Borland Tightens Up Development
At its annual Bor-Con show, Borland, Scotts Valley, Calif., unveiled what it calls Software Delivery Optimization (SDO), a plan to make software development more cost-effective by mapping the process to a company's needs, said Martin Frid-Nielsen, Borland's general manager and vice president of the development services platform business unit.
A key part of this strategy is to add project management features from the StarTeam configuration and change management tool and the CaliberRM requirements management tool into Borland's IDE products, including JBuilder, Frid-Nielsen said. Borland will also integrate these features into third-party IDEs, such as those from Microsoft and IBM Rational.
In fact, with SDO and related product changes, Borland appears to be heading in the same direction as IBM Rational, Microsoft and other competing tools vendors that this year unveiled their own plans to more closely integrate different aspects of the application development life cycle into a more unified platform.
Such a strategy aims to give developers greater insight into business requirements during the application-building process. It also will help developers that have various roles in the life cycle--such as code tester, application architect or modeler--work more efficiently as a team.
Solution providers say customers are becoming increasingly picky about which software development products they choose and are careful to use those that deliver the greatest business efficiency.
"Right now every customer is looking at value, the return on their investment," said Siby Vadakekkara, CEO of Edison, N.J.-based Marlabs, an application development service provider. "They want to know the best way to align their business needs with technology."
StarTeam 2005 and CaliberRM 2005 are scheduled to ship in 90 days. Each will include new search and analysis features, called Borland Search Server and Datamart, to help tie business processes and information to software development, Frid-Nielsen said.