Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft

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News: Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft

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  1. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft (46 messages)

    Borland Software Corporation today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held TogetherSoft Corporation for $82.5 million in cash and 9,050,000 shares of Borland common stock. Following acquisition announcements of Starbase and Boldsoft early in the month, Borland seems on its way to becoming a tools powerhouse.

    View the press release

    Upon completion of the acquisition, Borland plans to continue investing in both the Borland JBuilder and Together ControlCenter product lines, creating hybrid solutions that integrate design and development for Java, .Net, and all other leading platforms. In addition, Borland plans to continue to support TogetherSoft's existing strategy of offering design and analysis solutions that work with leading IDEs. Similarly, Borland plans to continue supporting other leading providers of design and analysis products. Finally, Borland plans to extend TogetherSoft's current products and deliver editions that are targeted at the indirect channel, replicating a seeding strategy that has been very successful for all Borland's solutions. Over the next 12 months, product lines from Borland and TogetherSoft are expected to evolve onto a common and shared underlying technology platform that would be designed to enable Borland to drive engineering synergies and provide an enhanced user experience.
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    Threaded Messages (46)

  2. Hint: Then lower the price...[ Go to top ]


    Just a hint: Don't take the following rule to determine the price:

    (price(JB) + price(TCC)) / 2.

    IMHO, the key reasons that TCC has problems in the market now are

    a) inflated price
    b) missed the "refactoring revolution"

    Cheers,
        Henrik Klagges
        TNGtech

    Reply to this Reply to original

  3. Hint: Then lower the price...[ Go to top ]

    who says TCC "has problems in the market"? I am right now watching a major telco introducing it as a standard tool - given the price tag, that alone should carry them on for a few years..
    Reply to this Reply to original

  4. Hint: Then lower the price...[ Go to top ]

    I agree that TCC is too pricey, although I use it now. I even quipped with a TCC sales rep that I would stand in their cafeteria with a cardboard sign that read "will code for a together license". All in all, however, I have not seen a Java centric UML modeling tool as sweet as control center, regardless of price. If integrated, the two could be very sweet indeed.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  5. Hint: Then lower the price...[ Go to top ]

    I even quipped with a TCC sales rep that I would stand in

    >their cafeteria with a cardboard sign that read "will code
    >for a together license".

    You are mostly welcome to stand in out cafeteria too if you want to. You will probably not get any license, but at least you will amuse us.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  6. Hint: Then lower the price...[ Go to top ]

    The biggest problem Together always had was being able to show all of its incredible power.

    Before we introduced the refactoring, we actually did a lot of refactoring "under the covers." That is, you could rename classes, or drag them to a new package, or rename a package -- and Together would quietly make all the necessary changes in other class/files to keep the code correct. We just never highlighted these capabilities as refactoring.

    Together is the most powerful and configurable tool in its space. In the hands of an expert, there is almost no limit to what you can have it do in terms of accelerating your application development.

    (I have used Together since 1994... when I could finally replace my PowerPoint object models and Excel sequence diagrams with a real tool!)
    Reply to this Reply to original

  7. Hint: Then lower the price...[ Go to top ]

    but the IDE is still the weak point in Together,
    it is not at the level of JBuilder or JDev
    Reply to this Reply to original

  8. Hint: Then lower the price...[ Go to top ]

    but the IDE is still the weak point in Together,

    >> it is not at the level of JBuilder or JDev

    Yes, but that is the place for integrating JBuilder and Together. This combination will be realy very interesting, let's hope that price will be less then current JBuilder + Together.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  9. Hint: Then lower the price...[ Go to top ]

    And will this "refactoring" work in the same quite way with version control systems and JSP pages?
    Reply to this Reply to original

  10. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    I find it amusing that right there on the front page of togethersoft.com there is a link to a competivie analysis that compares Together ControlCenter with, you guessed it, JBuilder:

    Together ControlCenter Competitive Analysis

    To be fair, the white paper also compares Together ControlCenter with Rational XDE, and the conclusion is basically that Together is as good as JBuilder, and much better than Rational.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  11. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    WooHOoo! TogetherJ is great for UML - beats the pants offa rational - but i never liked their IDE. This is pretty sweet!
    Reply to this Reply to original

  12. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Pretty sweet???

    I guess now we can expect TogetherSoft's price to be even more inflated and for support to be just as incompetent as Borland.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  13. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Borlands intention is quite clear:
    BoldSoft - UML for Delphi
    TogetherSoft - UML for Jbuilder
    StarBase - SCM for Delphi
    ? - SCM for Jbuilder

    Any suggections ?
    Reply to this Reply to original

  14. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Boldsoft is not UML for Delphi, it is an object persistence layer which uses UML imported from Rose. I'm sure Borland will integrate Together for Delphi as well as I know Together had a Delphi version in the works at one point. Another thing, Starbase is not SCM for Delphi alone, it is for any language.

    The real question in my mind is, how will Borland integrate these products and offer them for the most important platform: .NET.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  15. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    I think Borland's .NET strategy is relatively clear: port the VCL/(CLX?) to .NET, so that Delphi and C++Builder can deliver .NET solutions. I think the BoldSoft products are already .NET-compatible, and Together supports .NET as well. I think their goal is simply to have a high-quality development tool-set for every major platform: Java, Windows (.NET), and Linux.

    It's funny, because Borland just bought all of the products I've been using for the last couple of years (StarTeam and Together). And I still think JBuilder is a great IDE, and I prefer it.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Kito D. Mann
    kmann at virtua dot com
    Virtua, Inc.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  16. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Borland's intentions:

    Compete with Rational... Can anyone say BUP?...

    Starbase Caliber RM = Rational Requisite Pro
    TogetherSoft/Boldsoft = Rational Rose
    Starbase StarTeam = ClearCase

    If you want to guess who they'll aquire next, look to the Rational Suite. Automated Testing is the next logical step
    Reply to this Reply to original

  17. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Regarding Rose I doubt that could be called a competition. Have you looked at how Rose comes in 98, 98i, 2000e, 2001 and 2002 releases...the same look and every time there is a poor list of new features. I can't tell the same thing about Together/J.
    Well, Rational XDE deserves some attention, but not Rose for sure.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  18. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    re:
    > ... I find it amusing that right there on the front page of togethersoft.com there is a link to a competivie analysis that compares Together ControlCenter with, you guessed it, JBuilder...

    Legally, until the deal is approved and stamped "completed" the two companies are supposed to continue to go after business as usual.

    -- jon kern (formerly with TS)
    Reply to this Reply to original

  19. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Interesting, what's going to happend with the schedulled integration of TogetherCC and Eclipse? They planned the first beta in early of the december 2002...
    Reply to this Reply to original

  20. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Too bad. Pitty that IBM did not buy TogetherSoft. I was really expecting TCC plug-in for Exclipse.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  21. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    I thought that TogetherSoft had announced an eclipse plug-in anyway.

    See http://www.eclipse.org/org/eclipse_ts/
    Reply to this Reply to original

  22. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Is't Borland a member of Eclipse consortium?
    Maybe this move is defining their new strategy for Eclipse platform - Use: Eclipse SDK + JDT + Boraland components ported from JBuilder + TogetherJ componenets?
    I suppose it should be easier to use Eclipse as a glue for all those components then integrate TogetherJ with JBuilder.. and have another very slow Swing/IDE. I think Borland knows that Swing has no future compared to SWT...


    Michal
    Reply to this Reply to original

  23. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    If you read the Borland announcement you see the following: "Borland plans to evolve both products onto the same underlying platform within 12 months...". The "same underlying platform" might be Eclipse since Together has been working on a Eclipse port for a while and Borland is a member of the eclipse.org consortium.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  24. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Interesting,

    Webgain acquired by TogetherSoft
    TogetherSoft acquired by Borland
    Borland acquired by ????

    Syed
    Reply to this Reply to original

  25. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    IBM !!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Reply to this Reply to original

  26. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    You gotta love it, sure there is opertunity to screw up and find the worst of both, but here's hoping they get it right.

    Borland are certainly going to get a boost in terms of the TG R&D team.
    AFAIK together + eclipse was only going after those already using WSAD.
    So I doubt that will yeild what most people are after. The price is a sore point to. They TG maintain that they are the 'crown jewels' of the Java+UML ide. In that asumption they are spot on: they are the only serious contender in that space. The problem is that most companies are yet to be convinced that UML+Java is the best way. Myself I am persuaded, however if they are to persuade the comunity they have to go after market share, get the message out by example.
    The only way to get serious market share is to sort that price point... please?
    Reply to this Reply to original

  27. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    If I am not mistaken, Microsoft owns 25% of Borland.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  28. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    You are mistaken.
    Microsoft paid 100 million for some Borland patents
    and bougt shares for 25 mil.
    But this does not make 25% of company
    Reply to this Reply to original

  29. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    I'm dreaming already at a JBuilder special Weblogic edition
    with Together integrated
    it could become a kind of must in Java
    Reply to this Reply to original

  30. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Thanks for the clarification.

    I thinks it's interesting that Borland has made many aggressive moves since Microsoft has gotten involved.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  31. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    I thinks it's interesting that Borland has made many aggressive moves since Microsoft has gotten involved.


    Borland has some cash. In today's high-tech markets, you'd be surprised what you can buy for a little bit of cash. Hopefully Borland is making wise investments this time around ... this one (TogetherSoft) is probably a good buy, and the timing is good for TogetherSoft, which was apparently looking for a buyer.

    What we've witnessed is that Sun, Oracle and Borland have gobbled up most of the smaller tools players and IBM and BEA have expanded their own tools strategies. It's good to have several (not hundreds of) competing companies providing tools, and these five are probably in it for the long haul.

    Peace,

    Cameron Purdy
    Tangosol, Inc.
    Coherence: Easily share live data across a cluster!
    Reply to this Reply to original

  32. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    With this merger, what will happen to the WebGain suite of tools that TogetherSoft acquired earlier this year. Personally, I prefer JBuilder to WebGain and would like to see Visual Cafe go the way of the dodo bird. However, my company has an investment in WebGain and once again it looks threatened.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  33. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Hi,

    I do see a time when JBuilder will be the only available commercial IDE. However even with this market advantage I fail to understand how it can compete with a great tool like Eclipse.

    David
    Reply to this Reply to original

  34. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    I do see a time when JBuilder will be the only available commercial IDE. However even with this market advantage I fail to understand how it can compete with a great tool like Eclipse.


    You probably never used JBuilder ?
    Reply to this Reply to original

  35. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Yes I have thanks!

    It is a great IDE (A bit bloated) and was my IDE of choice for several years.

    However when considering how much it costs when there are great open source tools like Eclipse, XDoclet and ANT you have to wonder if the day of the commercial IDE is over.

    BTW have you ever used Eclipse, ANT, XDOCLET?

    David
    Reply to this Reply to original

  36. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    I noticed somwhere that they will close the WebGain IDE and will provide migration path to Jbuilder with integrated wizard for importing Visual Cafe projects inside JBuilder.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  37. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    There's an VisualCafe to JBuilder import wizard available at http://www.borland.com/products/downloads/download_jbuilder.html

    /PorkLip
    Reply to this Reply to original

  38. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    who will acquire IntelliJ?
    Reply to this Reply to original

  39. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    For what?
    Reply to this Reply to original

  40. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    probable there are something like a java developper suite
    with JBuilder and TCC in preparation,
    I eager to to test it,
    I'm already using them separetely
    Reply to this Reply to original

  41. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    IntelliJ developers were formerly some of the core designers of the innards of Together.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  42. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    None of the mentioned IDEs gives you the amount of control and quality of work you get with Intellij IDEA 3. That said, it is time to say one other thing clearly: UML modelling is not for everyone ( and class diagrams, still the main diagram type use din round trip engineering is not the most useful diagram type ).

    Few people can understand UML modelling in the way it would be required for them to make sense out of a tool like together. Besides, with the advent of design patterns (some decade ago!) it should be clear that it is often overload to expose the developers to the UML detail for everything.

    Diagrams are great for conceptual work - but they are clumsy for development not least because of the huge amount of space they occupy on the screen.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  43. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    InteliJ idea isn't about quality, its about ease of use. InteliJ is a great light weight easy to use IDE. It is perfect in the hands of those who know what they are doing and have an understanding of the implications of the code changes on the larger picture.
    It is highly probable that you can do as much damage as good with a misused refactoring.

    UML is currently not used by everyone, but that is no reason to believe that it is not potentialy usefull. That said there are of course no silver bullets, and some awfull ways of using any UML.
    When Together comes into its own is as a learning tool. You get to see the implications of your code on the UML diagram. This is priceless in a world where our developement teams are learning on their feet.

    As for design patterns the very people these are most usefull for are the developers, these are after all design not analysis patterns. Gone are the days of rigorus tech specs and 'programmers' now we are in the realm of developers who have to think about the implications of their work on the overall design.
    Hence refactoring, agile and all the other buzz words that sum up this reasignment of responsibility.

    My opinion...
    Dave
    Reply to this Reply to original

  44. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Hm, I have a feeling you might be wrong with the following statement:

    "You get to see the implications of your code on the UML diagram."

    I have to admit, I have not looked at together for some time, but the way I remember it, you see the implications mainly in a class diagram. But do you actually see all the implications of every potential code change in your all sequence, and interaction diagrams - since these are the diagrams being of much higher value than class diagrams.

    One of the reasons Design patterns are so valuable is because they offer an easy abstraction of the dynamic and the static object model at the same time.
    Reply to this Reply to original

  45. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Sequence diagrams can be generated from methods by Together. Plus if you prefer colaboration you can view any sequence as a colaboration just by right clicking. Same data different view.

    The sequence diagrams are not live updated though. This, at first, seems at odds with the way that class diagrams work but I find this usefull as there is a lot more information in sequence diagrams, and before and after comparison is quite usefull.

    I hear what you are saying about the ability to recognise dynamic behaviour from design patterns, and it is awareness of that, and the implications that change have to that dynamic behaviour, that I want my developement team to understand.

    Dave

    p.s. Just re-read my last message, sorry if that came across a little strong. :)
    Reply to this Reply to original

  46. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    not least because of the huge amount of space they occupy >on the screen.


    Yes, that has always been my main concern with UML...:|
    Reply to this Reply to original

  47. Borland to Acquire TogetherSoft[ Go to top ]

    Diagrams are great for conceptual work - but they are clumsy for development


    That is why Together allows you to work just at the code level or at the diagram level, or anywhere in between. Also, since the diagrams immediately reflect code changes, you can even be happily editing the code in JBuilder or IDEA (or vi) and (as long as you saved your work in the editors) switch to Together to see the impact -- visually.

    Obviously, when you are down and deep into coding method bodies, you likely do not need too much from the class diagram. But even late in the stage of development, it is often handy to use visual diagrams when determining how to make a "connection" to another object. Also, you can do some visual refactorings with drag-n-drop ease -- like moving classes to different packages, moving methods to superclasses, creating an interface and disconnecting a hard-wired dependency, etc.
    Reply to this Reply to original