SDA: What is the rationale behind leveraging Legadero’s core competencies?
Julian Quinn: Legadero has a mature, full-featured product for IT management and governance that offers lower total-cost-of-ownership, better ease-of-use and faster time-to-value than many others in the market. These were significant differentiators from other acquisition prospects we reviewed. These benefits, along with the product’s ability to fit within existing, heterogeneous IT environments, are synergistic with Borland’s own principles of innovation.
We believe that software is key to organisation’s competitive advantage – whether companies are focusing their development efforts on building custom software, customising packaged applications or integrating or updating existing systems. Legadero’s IT management and governance technology was perfectly suited to our core competency of software development and delivery, which factored into the decision.
SDA: What benefits and challenges have you encountered since acquiring Legadero in October?
JQ: The integration of Legadero and its Tempo technology has been seamless to date. We have initially focused on offering Tempo in the US marketplace and customer interest has been positively enthusiastic. In the first part of 2006, in addition to offering Borland Tempo as a stand-along product, Borland will be introducing a comprehensive IT Management and Governance solution that takes a holistic approach to the challenges surrounding IT Management and Governance – combining process improvement services, Tempo technology and skills training.
SDA: How is this union affecting existing TeraQuest and Borland customers? Does Borland plan to continue supporting the solutions these customers are currently using in the near future?
JQ: The addition of Legadero’s unique IT Management & Governance capabilities stands to benefit Borland customers in a number of ways. Specifically, an IT management and governance solution that is focused on software delivery enables customers to answer three key questions that can help them make the most of their software investments. These questions include: Are you doing the right software? Are you doing software right? And how do you know? By providing new capabilities for demand management, project portfolio management, resource management, as well as process and asset management, Borland can help customers get more visibility and control over their software portfolio – making the process more efficient, more predictable and more successful.
SDA: How does your recent acquisition of Legadero and its Tempo technology fit into Borland’s long-term Software Delivery Platform (SDO) roadmap?
JQ: Borland’s vision for Software Delivery Optimisation is about transforming software development and delivery into a more manageable and predictable business process to help companies maximise the business value of software. The ability to do this requires all roles within the software process to have access to the right data, at the right time to make the right decisions. Legaderos’ technology expands our existing ALM product suite with new capabilities for demand management, project portfolio management, resource management and process and asset management – key areas that allow CIOs, project managers and business analysts to get more visibility and control over their software investments.
SDA: How does Borland plan to integrate Tempo capabilities into its existing role-based Core Software Delivery Platform (SDP) for ALM?
JQ: Legadero’s technology will be re-branded Borland Tempo and sold to customers as an add-on, standalone product to existing ALM solutions. Going forward, Tempo will be fully integrated into Borland’s Core SDP ALM platform and will include new roles, such as a complete project manager role – in addition to its existing analyst, architect, developer and tester roles. Legadero’s expertise will also bring new process capabilities, such as the automation of demand management processes across all roles in the development lifecycle. Overall, Legadero’s solution is extremely complementary to Borland’s existing ALM product suite and the direction that we have been taking with the platform.
SDA: Exactly how does the Legadero’s process management and resource management expertise help Borland's customers better align teams, processes and technology in the software lifecycle?
JQ: By optimising development and delivery processes, including demand management, portfolio management, process management, resource management and asset management, and making sure they are aligned with business goals, the Legadero solution provides visibility to the whole organisation – regardless of where they are working. Specifically, the Tempo solution has completely browser-based and easy to integrate into any size organisation, any type of IT environment and with any software methodology.
SDA: As you align Legadero’s products with Borland’s offerings, are there any redundancies or product lines that will now be merged into one?
JQ: Currently, there are no plans to do so.
SDA: Is the acquisition of Legadero intended to play a larger role in the higher level SDP releases scheduled for next year?
JQ: Going forward, Tempo will be fully integrated into Borland’s Core SDP ALM platform. Once integrated, Borland Core SDP will include new roles, such as a complete project manager role – in addition to its existing analyst, architect, developer and tester roles. Legardero’s expertise will also bring new process capabilities, such as the automation of demand management processes across all roles in the development lifecycle. Overall, Legadero’s solution is extremely complementary to Borland’s existing ALM product suite and the direction that we have been taking with the platform. We will provide more details about the Core SDP roadmap in the coming months.
SDA: Does Borland plan more acquisitions in areas such as IT governance and people management to compliment its acquisitions of Legadero and TeraQuest? If so, what is the rationale for this?
JQ: Since our acquisition of TeraQuest in 2004, Borland has more process improvement experience in the area of application development than any other company. With the acquisition of Legadero, we will be helping companies accelerate their process improvement efforts by integrating and supporting Borland TeraQuest’s proven methodologies and best practices directly within the Tempo product, and in our Core SDP platform. Both acquisitions are milestones on the company’s path to software delivery optimisations, and are opening up new areas critical to driving better software and overall IT quality. The company will continue to examine potential areas for acquisition as it makes sense for customers and shareholders.
SDA: Do you feel that the acquisitions of Legadero and TeraQuest will provide you the competitive edge over other players like IBM and even Microsoft in the ALM paradigm? Please explain.
JQ: Software Delivery Optimisation is all about providing a managed business process around software development. The solution we are adding today with the acquisition of Legadero, on top of our earlier acquisition of TeraQuest, helps us further that vision by providing more control and visibility into the software delivery process – easily and rapidly. IBM, which acquired Systemcorp, requires significant investments in time and resources to get their IT management and governance solutions implemented, customised and adopted. Our solution with its lower total-cost-of-ownership, ease-of-use and faster time-to-value are significant benefits for customers who do not want to wait or cannot afford a huge upfront investment in time and resources, without compromising breadth of functionality.
When compared to competitive solutions, Borland Tempo offers better data gathering for decision-making processes, deep support for multi-level project plans with unlimited roll-up, and unique and powerful infrastructure assets management capabilities. |
