InformationWeek

November 10, 1997

Borland Offers Integrated Platform

Delphi Enterprise development tools aimed at low end

orland International Inc. will take the next major step in its enterprise strategy this week with Delphi Enterprise, its first heavy-duty distributed development platform.

The product represents the fruits of Borland's 18-month effort to integrate its Delphi rapid application development tool, Entera multiplatform enterprise middleware, and Midas application server into a single product. "Entera and Midas were separate solutions, and you had to do the integration yourself," says John Adams, an advanced technology manager with Arthur Andersen Business Consulting in Atlanta. "Now, there's capability for more seamless development on larger-scale enterprise requirements."

Some analysts expect the product to penetrate the low end of the market now led by Forté Software Inc. "We're out to take share from them," says Del Yokum, Borland's CEO, "and we'll do it with a solution that's open, easier to use, and offers high er productivity and higher performance."

With its fiscal house in better shape than it has been in for three years-revenue has been up for the past three quarters, two of which were profitable-the Scotts Valley, Calif., company is well-positioned to mount a bid for the distributed fourth-generation language crown. But it will be some time, analysts say, before Delphi Enterprise is capable of building the large systems Forté developers crank out with ease.

Pricing for Delphi Enterprise starts at $45,000. The product, available now, requires Windows 95 or NT clients, and supports application services on NT, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and IBM AIX.

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