“Should you encounter God on your journey” (Borland blog)

As some of you may know this is my last BDN post as a Borland employee. I have completed an 8 year journey that began in May of 1997 when I left my position as Managing Director at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and started a small software company, Bedouin. That ended 16 years on the “buy side” of information technology and began an 8 year trek focusing predominantly on software development productivity. It led to the Starbase acquisition – my running of the StarTeam and CaliberRM business unit to the point that they clearly became integral to Borland’s future. After that came my tenure as CTO working to evolve both Borland’s integrated “ALM” offering and the evolution towards Software Delivery Optimization.

Enough about me, let’s talk about me. It became clear to me early this year that two things had happened. One, the back of my mind was filling up with “mad science experiments” that were clearly outside the bounds of any foreseeable Borland business model. Two, I was no longer in the minority of people in the company at large, nor R&D who understood the needs of the enterprise customer and could align their needs with our product agenda. I was an important part of the team but perhaps somewhat less critical than in prior years.

Likewise, I enjoyed the entrepreneurial experience of Bedouin and it is something I am interested in doing again. So I am off to tease mad science experiments out of the back of my mind into perhaps a few front-of-mind commercial possibilities. To keep track with these I invite you to occasionally check in at pjktech.blogspot.com.

Now let’s talk about Borland. Borland is chock full of engineering talent. We have established the Office of Chief Scientists as a voice for the engineering team that regularly connects with executive management. Here is the one thing you need to know about Borland’s Chief Scientists, they are so smart that their brains have brains. We have a head of engineering for a good part of the ALM products who is A) The best engineering manager I have ever had work for me. B) The best engineering manager I have ever heard of. C) The best engineering manager I could dream up. D) All of the above. (The answer is “D”.)

For Delphi we have Danny, Alan, Eli and others. We have a walking encyclopedia (database?, Diamond Age Ractive?, one-man hive-mind?) of software – David I. He has voluminous knowledge of the past, a canny sense of the present and deep insight to the future. We have systems engineers who make a career of walking around the planet and kicking the heck out of IBM Rational. (SIDENOTE: It is amazing – the acquisitions that Atria – Pure – Rational did – and multiple years into the IBM stewardship customers are confronted with essentially LAN-based products in an exploding world of distributed development.) Our St. Petersberg team is not “offshore, low cost programmers” – they are a legitimate R&D team contributing mightily to the state of the art in tooling for Model Driven Development and Model Driven Architecture. Which reminds me – some of the Togethersoft guys in the United States are treasures; R.S, R.G, D.M, C.K. Who’s going to beat them – Telelogic? Serena VDM? No way.

I could write initials and cute hints for pages about R&D and still not have yet gotten to the relatively new and improved marketing team now in place which is arming a better educated direct-sales force, better than ever.

My management peers? You won’t find better people. They are honest, driven people committed to the success of the company. Does the management team I have been a part of make mistakes? Of course it does – we are unfortunately all too human. Do they castigate themselves; self-critique themselves to a depth greater than any of the outside critics – certainly. What could they do better? Be more ruthless. The products are good – the team is good – the market is huge – go for it guys. Stomp the also-rans like Telelogic and Serena.

My message for the company and friends I leave behind, for the people who I hope will live on in my IM list forever …

“Should you encounter God on your journey, God will be cut."

-Hattori Hanzo, Kill Bill Volume 1