I usually blog about business process management (BPM) issues that business analysts and line of business folks care about. In theory, some day we'll just be able to move rectangles and diamonds around on a screen (or a hologram or a... TBD) and the code--by then universally called services--that automates the business process sets represented by the rectangles and diamonds will automatically magically be sequenced and integrated. On the day after some day, when a merger, acquisition, big company contract, bad quarterly result, you-name-it, changes the sequence or the integration points, all we'll have to do is move the rectangle or diamond.
But someday is not here yet. Despite the theory, we still need application developers, architects and database professionals in the enterprise. (Even in the theory, we'll always need them back in the cloud somewhere.) So I was happy to read last year that the developers and architects that still need Borland software-development products still have that choice. That's because the tools part of Borland--which had been renamed CodeGear--was acquired by Embarcadero.
As of February 18, 2009 Embarcadero has turned what was a legal combination after the 2008 acquisition into an impressive real-beef combination of development tool technologies and licensing/go-to-market mechanisms.
As Michael Swindell, product marketing VP of Embarcadero explained it,
"CodeGear was a niche solution (for developers) and Embarcadero was in another niche (for database folks)... but these roles and related roles such as enterprise architect have been increasingly blended."
The new Embarcadero offering brings it altogether for the 21st century software developer, who is it at once architect, programmer, data analyst, QA tester and more. (That increasingly includes, at least in the enterprise in my opinion, business process analyst.) And although many of the stack vendors also offer something similar, their toolsets are naturally optimized for their platforms.
With Embarcadero now fully integrating Borland's tools with its heritage DataGear tools, developers have what I think of as the ultimate in "open choice:" JEE and Rails and .NET. Oracle and MySQL. Windows and Linux. And more.
But it is not just an updated technology integration. Embarcadero is making the access to the tools much easier as well with its membership concept (it's not a subscription; these are assets you own even if you stop maintenance), role-based tiering, instant-on access, and other options.
I do want to talk more about Embarcadero's support for BPMN out of the gate. Embarcadero's Greg Keller, Embarcadero's chief evangelist, assures me it's not at the expense of BPEL. But I decided to leave that discussion to another day. For today, congratulations to Embarcadero for keeping Borland alive.
-- Dennis Byron
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