Java Industry News

It’s only taken Borland two years but it’s finally dumped its CodeGear tools division, responsible for Borland’s hereditary JBuilder, Delphi and C++ Builder lines as well as its new web ventures into PHP and Ruby, said to be used by 7.5 million developers.

Embarcadero Technologies is buying it for about $23 million and the transaction’s supposed to close in 30-60 days. Thomas Cressey Bravo the private equity house that bought Embarcadero and took it private last year, is fronting the money.

Borland gets to keep CodeGear’s $7 million in receivables.

Embarcadero CEO Wayne Williams will run the combined development and database tools company, which is supposed to be worth $100 million in annual revenues with 15 million users, a base that’s supposed to grow at up to 10% a year. Embarcadero alone represents $60 million of that revenue.

Embarcadero purrs that it’ll be the largest independent software supplier of widgetry to build and manage heterogeneous applications and their databases. It’ll have 500 employees.

The merger promises broader support and deeper functionality across the application development lifecycle.

CodeGear was cut out of Borland’s Developer Tools Division and set up as a separate division in 2006 to sell it off in the face of open source competition like Eclipse. It had its own separate management, R&D, sales, marketing and operations.

Embarcadero plans to integrate Borland’s products with its own. It says applications are increasingly dependent on databases and integrated databases can evolve with application changes and applications can evolve along new data models. There should also be increased productivity and improved quality and availability.