Wednesday, April 29, 1998
Scotts Valley, CA
Inprise Corporation - Integrating the Enterprise
I've said many times in this column and in the numerous presentations around the world that
I came to Borland to be a part of the changing face of development. In my 13 years here we
have certainly done our share and more. We are now on the threshold of a new paradigm shift
to distributed object computing. Just as our Borland products radically simplified
the development of DOS, 16-bit Windows and 32-bit Windows programming, our new generation
of technologies and products are radically simplifying the process of programming CORBA and
DCOM applications.
Radically simplifying Distributed Enterprise Computing takes more than a new technology. It
takes an orchestrated effort of development, training, content, communication, mentoring,
and consulting to help all developers achieve successful completion of business critical projects.
Today, Wednesday April 29th 1998 we assembled a new company, Inprise Corporation, to champion the
next wave in enterprise computing.
Inprise Corporation
Inprise Corporation combines Borland's history of developing easy to use, powerful, open
and extensible development environments with Visigenic's industry leading CORBA distributed
object technologies. When I look at what we will be delivering over the next several quarters
I can see that the total is greater than just the sum of the two parts. Inprise, Integrating
the Enterprise, is the culmination of 18 months of hard work by our executive management team,
world class R&D team, marketing organization, sales group, developer support staff,
information systems, and the rest of our worldwide employee team. The years of brand name recognition
built around Borland will continue to be used for our development environment products.
Yesterday, employees at Borland in Scotts Valley, gathered together to raise glasses of champagne,
cola, water, and juice to toast the new company. The food included this cookie (note: this is not an internet
cookie :) Today in front of a distinguished group of customers, analysts and press at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Del Yocam and our executive
management team announced the new company. Also at the presentation today we also announced plans to develop and market the Inprise Application Server, the first Inprise Corporation product. The Inprise
Application Server will integrate our marketing leading development environments, scalable middleware, and application management solutions. The Visigenic family of products
will also be products of the Inprise Corporation and will be called Inprise VisiBroker.
Check out the news on our web site at Inprise.Com.
Borland - A Little History of the Name
Many of you have wondered where the name Borland came from. Everyone has heard different stories
over the years. To find out the real story I sent email messages to my first Borland boss, Philippe Kahn CEO and Chairman of
Starfish Software, and received messages from other old
Borlanders who helped track down the story.
The beginning of the Borland name started with a small company in Ireland. Three Danish citizens,
Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad founded Borland Ltd. in August 1981.
To quote Ole, "Borland happened to be the name of the off-the-shelf company we
bought from a corporate lawyer in order to set up shop quickly. Since
everybody else was Micro-this and Soft-that, we decided we were better
off sticking with Borland. Borland Ltd.'s first products were Menu Master (a user-definable,
menu-driven interface and job control language for the CP/M operating system) and Word
Index (a utility program producing an index, table of contents and cross references for
WordStar documents). These products were shown at the CP/M-82 show in San Francisco. A
business license in the name of Borland was filed in San Jose following the show in January 1983."
Meanwhile in the US, Philippe had started a company called MIT. To quote Philippe, "The
acronym MIT stood for 'Market In Time'. MIT developed tools and provided services for
computer hardware developers in Silicon Valley who wanted to 'Be on the Market In
Time'. I immediately signed up several customers because of my credentials
for the 1973 Micral (Check out the Computer Museum web site.
The Micral is now
recognized as the first ever PC and in 1982/83 had good fame among hardware makers). This gave
me an opportunity to sign-up customers such as Apple, Osborne and be with HP (For a few days
until they realized that I had come with a tourist visa). MIT worked well in Silicon Valley
because it also was close to the initials of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and that my customers were typically VP of Engineering for
Silicon Valley companies who liked the acronym."
Borland International changed from a private to public company when it was
incorporated in California on May 2, 1983. The company's original personnel in the US included
Philippe Kahn (President) and Spencer Ozawa (Vice President Operations), with Niels Jensen, Ole
Henriksen, and Mogens Glad based in Copenhagen. On July 10th, 1989 Borland was re-incorporated
in the state of
Delaware to take advantage of the state's "advanced and flexible corporation statutes".
While the CP/M products helped start the company, it was the great products that followed
that really put the Borland name on the map. With the release of Turbo Pascal 1.0, Borland
started its award winning push into the world of development environments and tools.
Borland licensed the Pascal compiler core, written by Anders Hejlsberg (Poly Data was the
name of his company in Denmark), and added the user interface and editor. Borland also
became best known and loved by end users with the release of SideKick the Desktop Organizer.
What was Borland all about? Anders says it best. "No white knights, no geniuses, just a
bunch of enthusiastic guys doing what seemed like a good idea."
Thank you Philippe, Spencer, Niels, Ole, Mogens, Anders, and many other Borlanders for the
history lesson and all that you have done and are continuing to do for our industry.
How do I feel about the new company?
As with every other change that I have seen over the last 13 years, I say RIGHT ON, and
to quote John Belushi from the movie Animal House, "Let's do it". Of course it will take some
of us time to change over (it's not just a simple global search and replace). When
a new year starts, how many of you still put last year on your checks?
When you hear our voice mail or see the signature line in our email messages you
will see the text, "INPRISE Corporation, Borland and VisiBroker Products". We are
alive and well and doing just fine thanks to you, our great customers, partners, and
stockholders. Rest assured, we are still committed to developing the best products
and technologies for enterprise, department, small business and individual
developers all over the world.
GO INPRISE !
davidi@inprise.com
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