Borland forays into project management tools

A global leader in platform independent solutions for Software Delivery Optimization, Borland Software has acquired Legadero, a small, privately owned company, to fill out Borland’s line of software development tools.

The purchase of the 20-person company will help Borland to gain a set of so-called IT governance applications for managing software development projects. Borland intends to immediately re-brand the Legadero products as Borland Tempo and integrate the company’s software with its own suite of application lifecycle tools.

Legadero’s software is used to manage software development projects within corporations. It provides tools for viewing the status of projects, prioritizing tasks and managing requests for changes. According to Eric Frieberg, vice president of product marketing and strategy at Borland, the addition of Legadero’s governance applications will help Borland offer tools that bring more structure to the development process and improve communication between programmers and system administrators. For example, a company may start a project to put a Web front-end onto a customer database. Writing the code is relatively straightforward, but the new Web-based application may require more hardware and software, as well as updated security policies. The Legadero software helps address these issues by providing updated project status information to IT staffers, Frieberg explained.

The purchase compliments Borland’s strategy to expand its product line beyond standalone programming tools and sell larger suites targeted at development teams. Earlier this year, Borland also acquired TeraQuest Metrics, which provides consulting services for improving software development processes. Both TeraQuest Metrics and Legadero are based in Austin, Texas.

Currently Borland’s primary competitors in the application lifecycle tools market are Microsoft and IBM which purchased Systemcorp, a company that provides project management tools for software development.