Borland Unveils Role-Based Development Tools

The Borland Core Software Delivery Platform delivers a development environment that contains customized tools for business analysts, software architects, developers and testers, officials with the Scotts Valley, Calif., company said.

The platform ties together Borland's application lifecycle management products in a collaborative environment that enables people to share their work. For example, a business analyst's software requirements based on business objectives would be shared with architects building architectural diagrams and code-centric models that provide guidance and direction to development teams.

Borland products that are part of the Core SDP include CaliberRM, which manages software requirements; Together, a design-centric development tool; JBuilder, a Java integrated development environment; StarTeam, a change and configuration management tool; and Optimizeit, which provides performance management.

Core SDP is the first product release since the company announced in September that it was going to offer integrated role-based tools, Melissa Webster, analyst for market researcher International Data Corp., said. Competitors IBM and Microsoft Corp. have also released similar tools with collaboration features.

"The trend toward role-based packaging is taking place across the board," Webster said. "It responds very well to customers' desires."

Such tools make it easier for organizations to determine how many licenses they need, since companies usually know the number of analysts, architects, developers and testers they have on staff, Webster said. Individual products make the buying process more difficult because several people working in different job categories may share a tool, but only one or two of those workers are actual power users of the product.

"Packaging by role makes it easier to buy because a company knows its headcount and how it's divided by role," Webster said.

In addition, the new Borland package is a better "out-of-the-box experience" for customers because all the tools are installed at once, and each tool is configured by default to the job it serves, Webster said.

"(The package) makes it more attractive for customers (of individual products) to adopt the rest of Borland's application-lifecycle tools, especially their software configuration and requirements management tools.

The Borland Core SDP is scheduled to ship late in the first quarter. Pricing includes licensing based on the platform and number of users in each job category. The package supports the open-source Eclipse development framework, and support is planned for the Microsoft .Net framework.