Borland repackaged to become Inprise

Visigenics buyout creates new identity to suit shift in market emphasis

In an effort to distance itself from its image as a low-end tools supplier, Borland has changed its name to Inprise.

Announcing the change in San Francisco last week, Borland chief executive Del Yocam said: ?It really is a new company. We have a new management team, customers, markets, products and partners. I wanted some way to express all this in a new name.?

At the same time, the company announced that it is working on an enterprise application server, to be rolled out piecemeal over the rest of the year, and that it is forming a professional services division.

The name Inprise was created by Lexicon Branding ? the consultancy that dreamed up Pentium and PowerBook.

The Borland name will be retained for the Delphi and JBuilder development tools.

The name change came two months after Borland took over Visigenics, the developer of Object Broker. Inprise will be more like Visigenics than like the ?old? Borland, said Yocam: it will target the enterprise, stressing services and creating a direct salesforce.

Borland, traditionally, sold its low-priced tools to independent software developers, using an indirect sales model. Inprise?s enterprise application server is being built around the Visibroker object request broker. It will be integrated with the Appcenter application management software, launched in February, and with Borland?s development tools.

The application server will be an integrated toolset for the development, deployment and management of distributed, object-oriented applications. Inprise will also add security services, Web services and links to legacy systems such as IBM?s Cics transaction monitor.

Inprise is also developing a transaction processing system, which is in beta.

? Report by Dominique Deckmyn.