Borland: Q2 03 for TogetherSoft, StarBase integration

De-Duping

.NET tools expected in the first half of next year from Borland Software Corp could see first steps towards tighter integration with offerings from TogetherSoft SA and StarBase Corp.

Executives told financial analysts this week integration between the recently acquired TogetherSoft's and StarBase's products and Borland's own would occur with product due in the second quarter of 2002.

While Borland did not go into details, that promise makes the company's .NET Development Environment a prime candidate as the first offering to feature tighter integration. .NET Development Environment has, to-date, been scheduled for the "first half" of 2003.

The product will be rolled out internally to Borland sales and field representatives in January.

If correct, Borland would appear to have also shifted .NET Development Environment's delivery. This would now coincide with the planned launch of Windows competitor Microsoft Corp's latest .NET offerings.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft has scheduled April to launch an updated version of its own .NET developer tools environment, Visual Studio.NET Everett, and Windows .NET 2003 operating system.

Even tighter integration of Borland's products with TogetherSoft and StarBase is scheduled for the second half of 2003, the company told a First Albany Technology Conference in New York, New York. Company chief executive Dale Fuller said while products are integrated already, through the companies' partnership arrangements, full integration would remove duplication of items like menus to speed developers' productivity.

Fuller said developers would become "orders of magnitude" faster.

He also hinted at possible product improvements, though integration, which would make Borland's tools more accessible to business managers. Java, especially, has suffered from complex development and programming environments of use only to experienced programmers.

Previous industry attempts to simplify development for business managers have failed, Fuller said, because they made life difficult for programmers who deal with the end results.

"In the past people have tried to focus on high-end abstractions of development. But the problem is people want to try things outside the box and when developers look at the code and say that might as well be in Navajo or Swahili," he said.

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