Borland finally sells its CodeGear tools division
Borland Software has sold its CodeGear development tools division to Embarcadero Technologies for about $23 million, the companies said Wednesday.
CodeGear sells the products that Borland used to be best known for--its JBuilder Java development tool, Delphi, and C++Builder. More recently, CodeGear has created development tools for PHP and Ruby.
Borland Software CEO Tod Nielsen
Two years ago, Borland CEO Tod Nielsen announced a plan to sell off the tools division separate from its application lifecycle management product line. The tools division has been hurt from competition from free, open-source products, notably the Eclipse IDE.
CodeGear products are aimed at individual programmers, while the lifecycle management suite is designed for teams of developers, testers, and architects.
Since then, Borland hadn't been able to find a buyer.
Embarcadero brings in more than $60 million in annual revenue selling database management and design tools. The acquisition gives it access to the millions of developers that use CodeGear software, it said.
Update 7:50 AM Pacific: corrected figure for Embarcadero's annual revenue before its planned acquisition of CodeGear.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin.
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Two years of looking for a buyer and all they manage to scrounge up is some specialty software company willing to blow $23 million on the remains of the Borland IDE tools.
It's been a slow and lingering death for the Borland IDE tools. But I'm guessing this sale is just about the final nail in that coffin.
To this day Delphi is the best native code windows development tool, and the only major (non-java) commerical competitor to MS's Visual Studio.