As reported in the tech news, (ex. Former
heavyweight Borland bought by Micro Focus) “The Austin, Texas-based software maker said
Wednesday that it has agreed to be acquired in its entirety by Micro Focus
International in a $75 million cash transaction, unanimously approved by the
boards of both companies.”
Borland last described itself as "the application lifecycle management company." It has
been struggling and lost a key turnaround player when former CEO Tod Nielsen
dropped off early this year to become VMWare's new CEO. Their glory days were
mostly pre-web and some products lost out to Open Source upstarts.
cNet
said that Micro Focus will acquire each outstanding share of Borland common
stock for $1 per share. That sounds cheap even for a former legend in software development circles, but it's a “premium
of 25 percent over the closing share price of 80 cents on May 5, and a premium
of approximately 67 percent over the average 30-day closing price of 60 cents.”
Micro
Focus is an enterprise software management company with a good international presence, and they also rolled in some of the quality and development management tools of Compuware into their portfolio at the same time. It hopes the Borland
acquisition to help it gain greater market share, increase its customer base,
and capture a larger penetration of the U.S. technology market.
The
news did not say if the Borland name is going to be retained. Borland itself
tried a rebranding from 1998 to 2000 using the name of "Inprise" before reverting to Borland for its greater name
recognition. They also bought one of the original software testing companies, Segue, for $100M back in 2006, as they attempted to migrate from being a development tools provider, to a "software delivery optimization" vendor. Another interesting year for acquisitions happening here. We certainly don't see the consolidation of established tech vendors slowing down any time soon.
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