Borland's Future?

Borland has named Tod Nilsen as its new leader. He will serve as the president and CEO, moving into his position a full four months after the previous chief executive left.

Nilsen comes to Borland with a wealth of experience at Oracle, Microsoft and BEA systems. At Microsoft, where he spent 12 years, he was the executive heading up development. It will be interesting to see what Nielsen has to say when he delivers the keynote speech this week at Borland's developers conference in San Francisco.

Borland offers a set of products focused on the development space with products for modeling, testing and writing code. A tough market to say the least, competition is coming from big players like Microsoft and IBM.

Earlier in the year, Borland purchased TeraQuest, a company specializing on CMMI, CMM and PMO. Last year we engaged TeraQuest to do an appraisal of our department process reviews. The appraisal included a full understanding of product development, IT, organizational change management, and improvement implementation. The purpose of the appraisal was to put in place the processes and best practices to help us execute on the business need(s).

(I will not go into the details of the assessment, but I will say that the outcome focused on CMMI and a much heavier approach than what we have implemented to date.)

I think the process improvement tools market is a tough arena. Microsoft is clearly entering this space with the introduction of Visual Team Systems where they offer Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) and Agile MSF. IBM is offering Rational Unified Process (RUP) and Agile Unified Process (AUP), a simplified version of RUP.

Well, I can go on and on about this, but will spare you the discomfort – at least for today.

Sales of JBuilder--Borland’s standalone development tool--are being threatened by Eclipse, an open-source product.

I personally think this is going to be a difficult job, yet an opportunity for Nilsen. Borland and Nilsen have an uphill battle ahead of themselves, with weak product offerings and internal resource struggles. Can they overcome these obstacles in order to succeed? We'll see...