Borland’s announcement came on the eve of Microsoft’s planned launch, today, of the second installment in its own tools story for developers building .NET applications and web services. Microsoft will launch Visual Studio.NET 2003 in San Francisco, California.
While elements of Borland’s .NET environment are in place, such as CaliberRM, StarTeam, Optimizeit Profiler and InterBase, the foundation – C Sharpe Builder – will not ship until Summer. Also currently missing, is a version of the Together line of design tools for .NET, planned for future release.
Borland, it seems, runs the risk of being left behind, launching a first version of its .NET tools while Microsoft steams ahead with a second release this week. Borland, though, has an edge in the field of modeling plus the advantage of cross-platform tools giving it room for growth against Microsoft and – ultimately – tools rival IBM Corp.
Visual Studio.NET 2003 is the first version of Microsoft’s .NET development environment to be tied into a Windows operating system – Windows Server 2003, which is also due for launch today – from day one. Additional features in Microsoft’s integrated development environment (IDE) include the .NET Compact Framework, which enables developers to build for handheld and small footprint devices.
Borland, though, believes that far from lagging Microsoft its timing is right, as .NET is only now starting to gain momentum, moving beyond customers’ pilot phase. Analyst Garter predicts that the C Sharp community will grow to 2.5 million developers by 2006, up from roughly 100,000 at Microsoft’s last count. Gartner also believes C Sharp will closely challenge Java, also expected to reach 2.5 million developers by 2006, up from 1.5 million professional developers in 2002.
Michael Swindell, director of product and technology for Borland’s rapid application development (RAD) group, said: We see don’t see it [the launch] as a disadvantage or that we are late.
Others believe Borland’s products will throw-down a competitive gauntlet to Microsoft in application lifecycle management – especially modeling. Unified Modeling Language (UML) has become the de-facto standard for application modeling, with the ultimate goal that developers design and model code in an abstract layer while generating code, and so reducing the need for hands-on programming.
The Architect and Enterprise editions of Visual Studio.NET support UML through Microsoft’s Visio modeling engine. Visio, though, is regarded as lacking features offered by products from specialized vendors like Rational Software Corp and TogetherSoft Corp.
Microsoft’s problem is, though, that Rational, whose Rose and XDE UML products worked extremely well inside Visual Studio.NET, is owned by web services and Java competitor IBM Corp.
TogetherSoft, meanwhile, was snapped-up by Borland, to build out Borland’s application lifecycle management offering. The .NET version of TogetherSoft is expected to give Borland an edge over Microsoft in the modeling arena.
Ownership of TogetherSoft means Borland can potentially look beyond competition from Microsoft to focus on IBM and Rational. Borland hopes to win customers of Rational, potentially concerned by the impact IBM’s presence will have on Rational’s product strategy and whether they can now look forward to an influx of Global Services consultants.
Borland’s opportunity for growth in the modeling and design aspects of application lifecycle management looks good. Gartner notes that products such as Together ControlCenter currently have between 3% to 5% market share in enterprises.
Rational’s chief scientist Grady Booch, meanwhile, is sanguine over the chances of IBM/Rational and Borland’s relative co-existence in this virgin market. Booch believed there is still a great deal of ignorance about UML-based application design and modeling, which creates a huge opportunity for both companies. Our biggest competitor is ignorance and inertia, and ignorance is a growth industry, Booch recently told ComputerWire.
Bereft of its Rational partner, Microsoft, meanwhile, faces an unpleasant dilemma: build a more fully featured UML environment or partner even more tightly with Borland – Borland company executives last year told ComputerWire that in the wake of IBM’s Rational acquisition they suddenly enjoyed easier access to executives at Microsoft.
Away from modeling, Borland holds a second competitive advantage over Microsoft’s .NET tools. Visual Studio.Net is a Windows only environment, while Borland promises interoperability between .NET and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). A version of Together .NET would, for example, take its place in Borland’s arsenal alongside versions already available for J2EE and IBM’s WebSphere Studio.
Sam Patterson, chief executive officer of ComponentSource, believes C Sharp Builder gives Borland a completely integrated toolset for developing across different platforms. Integration means customers do not need to hunt around and integrate point-solution tools or maintain different IDEs for Java and .NET.
Patterson, whose company provides more re-usable software components for both .NET and J2EE in addition to other technologies, believes large organizations run multiple platforms and do not declare for either Windows or Java, as vendors would have you believe.
Borland is building one toolbox for use across different platforms… you don’t have to learn all the different environments and quirks of multiple IDEs, Patterson said.
The market for .NET is in its early stages with much growth in developers and applications yet expected. Despite an arguably late start, there are signs that Borland is preparing to fight Microsoft on .NET using the techniques, such as innovation, that helped establish it as the number-two tools player on Windows against Microsoft.
In the 1990s, Borland bested Microsoft’s own Windows tools using RAD. Now it threatens .NET with modeling, UML and application lifecycle management capabilities.
This time, though, there is a new angle: web services. Web services require cross-platform IDEs and interoperability between .NET and J2EE-based applications and services. Borland’s cross-platform approach could help in the fight against Microsoft while building a healthy, and entrenched position, against IBM and Rational.
Source: Computerwire