Borland Plots Its Survival Course Through Delphi

Sometimes the financial and managerial travails of a company can obscure its own products. That has certainly been the case with Borland International Inc., which has been beset with losses, layoffs and lawsuits as it labored to deliver upgrades of its mainstay products like the Paradox and dBase database management programs.

Borland's newest product, Delphi, which ships this week, could be the company's last and best hope for renewed prosperity, if not continued survival.

Delphi is a visual programming tool. That means that it allows software developers to create their own applications to run on Microsoft's Windows operating system by point-and-click and drag-and-drop rather than by laboriously writing thousands of lines of computer code from scratch.

Some coding is still necessary, and this is definitely not a product for end-users, but tools like Delphi can speed the programmer's task considerably. A corporate in-house programmer for example, might use Delphi to create software for tracking purchasing orders.

Unfortunately, Delphi is entering a market already defined by three successful products: Powerbuilder from Powersoft, a company recently acquired by Sybase. SQL Windows, from Gupta. Visual Basic, from Microsoft.

Borland says Delphi offers certain technological advantages over these products, but all of these companies can claim one fundamental advantage over Borland: they are financially healthy.

Borland, which hasn't had an operating profit in three years, in January reported a $22.9 million third quarter loss, on sharply lower revenues.

Corporations are often reluctant to adopt a product, no matter how good, from a company that appears shaky _ especially a product in Delphi's league, which can cost $2,000 and would be used for a company's most important dataprocessing needs.

Delphi primary advantage over the other products is the inclusion of a compiler _ a software program that translates the English-like syntax of programming languages like Pascal and Basic into the ones and zeros of machine language.

Compiled applications run faster than those that the computer must translate on the fly, which is basically how the competing tools work. That's a real advantage, analysts say. But it is one they expect the other companies eventually to match. So Borland may have a limited window of opportunity.

"They've got to prove that Delphi does something new and different besides providing compiled code," said Brent Williams, an analyst with the Gartner Group. "A year and a half from now, everybody will have compiled code."

In many ways, Delphi embodies the return to Borland's roots, something that the company's management has been talking about ever since it sold Quattro Pro, a spreadsheet application, to Novell Inc. last year.

Phillipe Kahn, Borland's recently deposed chief executive, founded Borland in 1983 on the strength of his personal computer version of the programming language Pascal. He initially sold the product by mail order, taking out small advertisements in computer magazines. Software developers remain loyal to Borland's languages and compilers, which have continued to win accolades even as the company foundered.

"We looked at the combination of our skills _ Windows development, fast compiler technology and database _ and asked how can we push past the limits of these other tools," said Paul H. Gross, Borland's vice president for research and development. Because it uses a programming language that can be compiled, he said, "applications made with Delphi will run 10 to 20 times faster," than those created with other visual tools.

Reviews in computer trade publications say the speed claim is typical Borlandian hyperbole, but that Delphi applications are nonetheless demonstrably faster than comparable programs developed with Microsoft's Visual Basic, for example.

PC Computing magazine dubbed Delphi a "Visual Basic killer." The review said that Delphi applications run nearly as fast as those created in C, a powerful but dauntingly difficult traditional programming language invented more than a decade ago at AT T's Bell Labs.

Borland tested pre-production versions of Delphi with users at over 5,000 so-called beta sites. In anticipation of the release of Delphi, a small industry of books, magazines, user groups and third-party software tools has sprung up.

In November, at the Comdex Fall trade show in Las Vegas, Delphi won the 1994 Best Of Comdex Award in the development/system software category.

"I've been waiting for a product like this ever since I started doing PC development, particularly Windows development," said Art Hill, vice president in the Cash Management Systems Group at The First National Bank of Chicago, one of the beta users. "With so many of these other tools, you can't get to the actual code, so if the visual tools aren't enough you're in a box."

Actually, the "visual" label on visual programming tools is, like so many ease-of-use claims in computing, a bit of an exaggeration. If applications built with these tools are to do anything, one still has to write some code.

That means using Basic in the case of Visual Basic, for example, and using Object Pascal in the case of Delphi. There is an inevitable tradeoff: the less code that is written, the slower and less flexible the applications.

Nevertheless, the programs dramatically speed up the creation of graphic user interfaces, which can take up to 80 percent of a programmer's time. Commonly used graphic items, like button bars and dialogue boxes, can dropped into a program, moved about on the screen and resized or altered at will, rather than having to be created from scratch. In effect, the programs exploit the ease of use of Microsoft's Windows operating system software to create new programs.

Because of limitations in their included programming languages, some of the visual tools that Delphi will compete with "can do some of the job, but not the whole job," said James Phan, a member of the technical staff at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who is also a Delphi beta-tester. "I can use this product to build very complex applications," he said. He estimated that Delphi will reduce a two-year development project at the lab to one year or less.

In the wake of Kahn's ouster last month, Borland announced that it would lay off 650 employees _ 40 percent of its workforce _ and revamp its operations to concentrate on producing and selling products to software developers.

Gross conceded that sales to major corporate accounts will be difficult unless Borland's restructuring is perceived as successful and the company returns to profitability. But he said that among independent software developers, and even among developers within large organizations, the health of Borland is less of an issue.

"In the corporate segment right now, we're not going to enjoy as much success because of our red ink," he said. "But in the developer community, and at the departmental level, there is a tremendous amount of Borland loyalty."

There may also be an emerging Delphi loyalty. "I face that issue every day," said Sterling Stoudenmire, manager of the technical competence center for Arthur Anderson's Business Consulting Group, referring to concern about Borland's losses.

"Borland's future may be in doubt, but Delphi's future is not," he said, suggesting that some deeper-pocketed acquirer would come forward if the product were to go on the block. "It's a fantastic tool."

Copyright 1995
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