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newsmaker The dichotomy between business and IT manifests itself even in software development.
The panacea for this perennial problem that most CIOs face might just lie in application lifecycle management (ALM) software.
Borland CEO Tod Nielsen says what most CIOs know about their software development projects pales in comparison to the high visibility of business processes usually available on ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems.
Nielsen believes that to gain better visibility, CIOs and IT managers should look at ALM which pries deep into the software development process.
Famous for its Turbo Pascal development platform in its heyday during the 1980s, Borland has earmarked ALM as its main growth engine.
In an interview with ZDNet Asia, Nielsen discusses the company's new strategic direction and why software bugs are not discovered earlier. He also foresees the possibility of all developer tools being given out for free.
Q. Borland is best known for its development tools. Now, the company is making an all-out push for ALM. Can you explain the shift in focus?
Nielsen: As an industry, we've been throwing all kinds of runtimes at customers and yet nothing has changed much in software delivery and development. The problems that IT has today are still the same as those 20 years ago. One of basic tenets of the computer world is, garbage in equals garbage out. And so, I thought it's time for someone to fix the garbage-in problem. We set our focus on ALM and acquired a company called Segue to expand our software testing and quality offering. We think we've found a market opportunity, and able to execute our strategy.
How is Open ALM instrumental to this strategy?
Right now, when we talk to customers about Borland, their first response is Turbo Pascal, and they don't necessarily know about Open ALM. So we launched this branding campaign around Open ALM to associate Borland's brand with ALM. But more importantly, we did two things that have been significant: one is our customer manifesto to give customers what they expect from our ALM offering. The second is we don't have a platform bias unlike some of our competitors who tie you to Java, WebSphere or .Net. We have a broad set of tools in our offering, but if customers still want to use Mercury, that's okay. Since we acquired Segue, we still release integration tools with Mercury to ensure that our offerings integrate with customers'.
The bottom line in the ALM space is that customers are looking for visibility and transparency so they can turn their software development into a managed business process like sales force [automation] and ERP (enterprise resource planning). But IT is like a big black box that doesn't deliver on time and on budget, in general. What customers want is some insight into IT.
How does Borland's independent ALM platform differ from competitors?
If customers go to Microsoft, they know that their tools will work well in a Microsoft environment, and not in Java. IBM has also tied the Rational development platform closely to the WebSphere environment. But what customers want is for their software delivery to be independent, so that they use the same development process to target both Java and .Net platforms. Through acquisitions or complexities of the real world, customers need to support multiple environments, and they turn to us because one set of tools can support both.
What about open source development efforts?
We support open source, and a good example is Gauntlet [open source integration software], which sits on top of our change management system called StarTeam, as well as different types of CVS (open source version control). What we haven't seen in the open source side, is open source vendors at the ALM level--there's version control, but I don't see [development] requirements and higher level dashboards.
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