Borland acquires e-services firm

BANGALORE: Borland’s recently announced acquisition of Bedouin, Inc. will

help accelerate the company’s plan to support the Application Service Provider

(ASP) marketplace, and establish itself as an early leader in the emerging

market for Developer Service Providers (DSP).

In addition, Borland has created a fourth business unit, Borland Developer

Services, which 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. 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 a 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 confront 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 tens 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."

"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 Ray Bradbery, Vice President, Borland Asia Pacific. "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.