Borland Software Corporation today announced a significant expansion in the company’s support for Eclipse, an open-source community and universal development platform supporting multiple languages, deployment platforms and technologies. Borland will play a new leadership role in advancing Eclipse technology by joining the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors as a Strategic Developer. The company will also commit a full-time development team to expand the Eclipse platform and contribute to areas such as modeling that play an important role in Borland’s vision for Software Delivery Optimization.
As part of this increased investment, Borland will expand its use of Eclipse as a platform across its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) product line. This, along with Borland’s increasing support for Microsoft Visual Studio®, can continue to give customers enterprise-strength ALM solutions on the technology of their choice, while still helping reduce the growing complexity of heterogeneous IT environments. Eclipse and Visual Studio have become two of the leading development platforms today. Borland will help customers to bridge these technologies and better leverage the investments they’ve made in them.
“Since joining the organization as a founding member, we’ve seen Eclipse evolve into something that is much more than just an integrated development environment (IDE),” said Pat Kerpan, chief technology officer at Borland. “Eclipse and IDEs in general have evolved from simply being a feature container into a new kind of development platform – a platform on which companies like Borland are building high-value ALM capabilities that make software development more manageable, predictable, efficient and successful.”
Borland’s ability to leverage Eclipse in its solutions and services for Software Delivery Optimization will benefit Eclipse users, as well as Borland customers and partners. It will enable Eclipse users to take advantage of Borland’s wide range of enterprise-class ALM products. It will also enable Borland customers to take advantage of the rapidly growing Eclipse ecosystem, plug-ins and advancements on the Eclipse open source projects. For Borland partners, it will provide a common integration platform to help reduce costs and speed the delivery of integrated offerings.
“Eclipse is becoming a way for IT organizations to reclaim control of their development environment,” stated Carl Zetie, vice president of Forrester Research in an October 2004 report entitled Eclipse Changes the Game for Development Tools. “Eclipse’s real value comes from the ability to assemble just the right combination of tools and resources that an organization – and individual roles within an organization – need… For those vendors brave enough to grasp the implications and embrace the change, it represents a huge opportunity to change the economics of the development tools market.”
In an effort to drive ALM advancements on the Eclipse platform, Borland will also lead the proposal for a new graphical modeling framework that would build upon, bridge and extend the existing modeling technology within the Eclipse community. Modeling continues to gain traction as enterprises look to reduce IT complexity, improve team efficiency and collaboration and more closely connect IT and business requirements. It is an important element of Borland’s Software Delivery Optimization strategy and Borland will make a significant investment in expanding Eclipse to better address this area.
“The Object Management Group™ (OMG™) is delighted to see Borland stepping up their commitment to Eclipse and providing leadership to Eclipse modeling activities,” said Dr. Richard Soley, chairman and chief executive officer of OMG. “OMG is absolutely committed to collaborating with the Eclipse Foundation to advance an open source implementation of the OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA®) standards. Borland’s long and continuing leadership at OMG has been a major part of our success in developing and maintaining the MDA standards and they are a natural fit for this role in Eclipse.”
As a strong proponent for open systems, platform independence and customer choice, Borland will continue to support and build out products and services on both Eclipse and the Microsoft Visual Studio framework. Borland will also continue to advance the features and capabilities of its award-winning JBuilder Java IDE.
“Borland’s extensive experience and expertise with application lifecycle management is a great asset for advancing the Eclipse vision of a universal development platform,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “We look forward to Borland’s contributions to our Board of Directors, as a project leader, as a contributor of innovative technology and as a vocal advocate for the Eclipse platform.”
