In addition, Borland has created a fourth business unit, Borland Developer Services. The acquisition of Bedouin will accelerate Borland’s previously announced plan to support the application service provider (ASP) marketplace, and establish Borland as an early leader in the emerging market for Developer Service Providers (DSP).
Borland Developer Services will leverage Bedouin’s expertise in building and deploying e-services, such as team coordination, time tracking, and customer relationship management, to deliver a new platform that will allow customers to build, deploy and manage applications via the Internet. With the Borland DSP, users will be able to customize their development environment according to their specific needs.
Development Service Providers, as in the existing ASP marketplace, will provide customers with hosted applications and services. Instead of supporting corporate operations such as human resources or customer relationship management, DSPs will support developers, providing hosted developer services for the complete software development lifecycle.
Companies are experiencing increased global development with multi-location teams, building complex e-business applications, which would benefit greatly from a one-stop-shop such as the Borland DSP, said Tom Dwyer, managing director for Internet infrastructure group at the Aberdeen Group. Companies will be able to reduce costs and speed time to market, which will help increase productivity and profitability.
The Borland Developer Services business unit will deliver ASP-style benefits to developers and development shops, which include reduced up-front costs, easier multi-location team management, lower infrastructure costs, faster time-to-market and increased security. For the first time, companies can take advantage of best-of-breed development facility at a fraction of the cost along with the expertise needed to support an in-house solution.
In managing large software projects, I often confronted the challenge of providing my staff with a robust set of development lifecycle tools on a distributed basis, said Patrick J. Kerpan, founder of Bedouin. In developing the DSP, I saw the opportunity through Bedouin to solve this problem for the ten of thousands of corporate development teams working around the world today. By combining with Borland’s existing two million strong customer base, and award winning Java, C++, and Delphi development environments, we are positioned to create the leading hosted software development service.
Borland first announced its plans to develop products for the ASP marketplace in November 1999. Borland’s plans to enter the developer services market were outlined in July during President and CEO Dale Fuller’s keynote speech at Borland’s annual developer conference in San Diego, California.
We have always been known for anticipating the needs of software developers, and the Borland DSP is a natural extension of our vision to offer the best development, deployment and management solutions for customers, said Fuller. The acquisition of Bedouin will help us bring software development to an entirely new level. The Borland DSP will be the premier platform for global companies to develop applications with the Internet as the platform.
Borland plans to locate the Borland Developer Services business unit in Chicago, Illinois. Bedouin brings with it a strong product management and software development team who will form the core management of the new Borland Developer Services division. Leading that team will be Patrick J. Kerpan and Dwight Koop, both enterprise application development veterans and pioneers in the hosted Internet services space; Kerpan will become the vice president and general manager of the new business unit.
