By Martin LaMonica
Wednesday, November 09 2005 10:32 AM
URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,39289034,00.htm

Borland Software has named Tod Nielsen as its president and CEO, four months after the previous chief executive left following poor financial results.

Nielsen was most recently at Oracle, where he worked for less than six months as a senior vice president in its database and middleware business. Before that, he worked at BEA Systems, a middleware and tools company, from 2001 until August 2004 when he resigned as chief marketing officer. He was also a development executive at Microsoft, where he spent 12 years.

Borland Chairman William Hooper said the company chose Nielsen because of his knowledge of Borland's market and his management experience. Nielsen is scheduled to deliver the keynote speech this week at Borland's developers conference in San Francisco.

The change in leadership at Borland comes after Dale Fuller, who led the company for six years, stepped down in July after a disappointing second quarter. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company named Scott Arnold as its interim CEO. Arnold is leaving Borland, the company said.

According to analysts, Borland is struggling to shift the source of its revenue from standalone development tools to larger suites of

Borland has assembled a broader product set that includes tools for modeling, testing and writing code. But it faces competition from industry heavyweights IBM and Microsoft in this market.

Meanwhile, sales of JBuilder, its standalone development tool, are being undercut by Eclipse, an open-source product, according to analysts.

Nielsen said in a statement that he intends to stick to Borland's "software delivery optimization" strategy of selling lifecycle suites.

"This is a company with a rich history that is synonymous with application development, and has a strong vision for the future of software delivery," Nielsen said.

Nielsen's appointment as president and CEO will be effective Wednesday.