Borland touts Software Delivery Optimization

At the BorCon conference this week, Borland Software will reveal its Software Delivery Optimization strategy, which leverages the company’s ALM (application lifecycle management) and developer products to ease software development and maintenance.

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The strategy ultimately will feature a bundle of the company’s products, code-named Themis, due out in the first half of 2005, which purports to provide a platform for integrated, repeatable development processes. Borland this week as part of the strategy also will unveil the 2005 versions of its CalibreRM requirements management product and StarTeam configuration management product, both of which are due in late 2004. Project estimation and planning as well as information mining across distributed networks will be featured in these releases.

With its new strategy, Borland is looking to address the current lack of process control in software development projects.

“The issue is that we are still addressing software development and delivery as though it is an art,” said Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer at Borland. Software development processes have been dependent on a few experts within an organization rather than using a more managed, predictable process, he said, adding that software projects have lacked the process control of modern-day manufacturing processes and are subject to error.

“Software Delivery Optimization is about creating an accelerated yet disciplined process for delivering quality software with maximum business value,” Jackson said. The goal is tighter integration among the business, development, and IT operations audiences through Borland’s ALM platform, he added.

Themis is planned as an integrated platform for building software projects, featuring more integration and collaboration and, over time, adding more business process automation and management.

The Themis package for Java-based development will feature CalibreRM, the Together modeling product, StarTeam, Optimizeit performance testing, and the JBuilder IDE. The products also will continue to be offered individually. A Microsoft .Net-based version of Themis is planned after the Java edition.

With its strategy, Borland is attempting to address a legitimate issue while boosting its ALM arsenal, an analyst said.

“They have finally built a position [and] framework that takes ALM and puts something behind it, something that makes it better than just application lifecycle,” said Thomas Murphy, vice president at Meta Group. “This will give them a way to move to how [to] manage your application portfolio, how to bridge from development to operations, and thus how to better coordinate the actions of IT with the business.”

Borland will expand change management in CalibreRM 2005 through use of the Estimate software technology it recently acquired from Software Productivity Center.

Borland expects Themis to compete against the upcoming IBM Rational Atlantic tools portfolio.