Borland to hit the big boys

Borland Software has initiated a drive to stitch up channel arrangements with large system integrators and consultancy firms, following three acquisitions it made in October last year.

The company is targeting between 10 and 15 international and domestic system integrators operating in Australia and New Zealand with a view to setting up partnership arrangements, said Nick Jackson, director of business development, Asia-Pacific at Borland. He said the company is currently in discussions with the likes of Deloitte, KPMG and Accenture.

“We are in the middle of a number of discussions with the Deloitte's, KPMG's Accenture's and top SIs to have engagements with these companies at different levels,” Jackson said.

The acquisitions have catapulted Borland from a pure software development company with its JBuilder and Delphi development environments into the broader software life cycle management arena, hence the requirement to strike deals with larger SIs and consultancies, he said.

“Borland has been historically strong in the development space with JBuilder and Delphi, but we made acquisitions and broadened our offerings into the life cycle management space,” he said.

In October last year the company acquired TogetherSoft, a developer of tools for accelerating software development, integrating the company's products with its own development tools. It also acquired StarBase, which develops the StarTeam software configuration management technology including life cycle capabilities for defining application software and content development and development tools vendor BoldSoft. It is also integrating StarBase's software within its own development tools.

Borland earlier this year claimed it now tackles every aspect of constructing an application from the ground up. Post acquisition Borland now targets six areas--application development, testing, deployment, definition, design and change management, the company claimed.

“Borland is a different company today than we were six to eight months ago. We're working to develop relationships with system integrators. That's a focus we're started to concentrate on worldwide,” Jackson said.

He said the company is finding that requirement management in the software space is a real challenge any time a customer is trying to flesh out a business requirement for a software rollout. “If you don't get the requirements bedded down everything else will get bent out of shape very quickly,” he said, adding that SIs and consultancy partners play a major role here.

Currently, between 20 and 30 percent of Borland's sales revenue in Australia and New Zealand is generated through indirect channels.

Jackson said Borland has had thirteen consecutive quarters of profitability and grew 28 percent in the 2003 financial year compared to 2002.