May 29, 2002 - Borland Software Corporation (Nasdaq NM: BORL) announced it has acquired all the assets of privately held Highlander Engineering, Inc., a provider of software solutions for the embedded systems market. The transaction involves cash earnout payments not to exceed $2 million over a two-year period contingent upon the financial performance of Highlander software products and services. Borland management does not expect this acquisition to have a material impact on revenues or net income for 2002.
Headquartered in Lakeland, Florida, and a long-standing partner of Borland, Highlander provides VisiBroker“-RT, a complete CORBA“ runtime and supporting environment for embedded systems that is based on the core technology in Borland“ Enterprise Server. Highlander primarily serves Fortune 500 companies, including Ciena, Cisco, Fujitsu, GE Medical, KLA Tencor, NEC, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Schlumberger, many of whom are customers Highlander shares with Borland.
Highlander was founded in 1994 and has been a Borland partner and licensee since 1996. Highlander's engineering operations are expected to remain in their current Florida facilities, while the sales and marketing organization will be assimilated into Borland worldwide.
"Just as our January 2002 purchase of VMGEAR extended our footprint in the Java application development lifecycle, this acquisition builds on our introduction of JBuilder‘ MobileSet‘ and JDataStore‘ and expands Borland’s presence in the embedded and wireless applications space," said Dale L. Fuller, president and CEO of Borland. "With Highlander, we can offer our customers a complete solution for the development and deployment of interoperable applications across embedded and enterprise environments. Borland is committed to acquiring technologies that complement or further extend our existing technology capabilities.. Both acquisitions are consistent with our goal of providing our customers with the freedom to develop, deploy and integrate applications across all major platforms while enhancing the growth of our development and deployment revenues."
Addressing the Embedded Market
Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is the leading standard for building distributed applications requiring high availability, performance, and security. The CORBA standard is especially relevant for embedded software, a market that industry analysts expect will exceed $1.0 billion by 2004. CORBA has made significant inroads into several embedded software verticals, including telecommunications, defense, electronics, manufacturing equipment, and instrumentation. Highlander was the first to offer embedded implementations of the CORBA 2.0 standard and even today is the only provider to be fully compliant with the CORBA 2.3.1 specifications.
"As embedded and enterprise applications become more tightly integrated and converge, rapid development of distributed applications across heterogeneous environments is becoming a must-have capability for today's embedded systems developers," said Ken Black, founder, president, and CEO of Highlander. "Our successful partnership with Borland has allowed our customers to take advantage of the proven reliability and interoperability of Borland Enterprise Server and freed us to focus on the extensions and optimizations required for embedded and real-time applications. We are excited about joining Borland and leveraging its global distribution and support network to bring our time-to-market and interoperability benefits to even more customers."
About Borland Enterprise Server
The Borland Enterprise Server family of application servers offers a range of functionality to support today’s complex application development and deployment environments. Based on Borland VisiBroker®, the world’s most deployed CORBA infrastructure, the Borland Enterprise Server was engineered to provide high performance and reliability at a low overall cost of ownership. From deploying and running JSPs and servlets to enterprise J2EE-based application deployments, Borland Enterprise Server provides the tools, performance, and deployment flexibility to manage implementations effectively and reliably throughout an ever-changing IT environment. The Borland Enterprise Server is available in three editions: Web Edition, VisiBroker Edition, and AppServer™ Edition. For more information, visit http://www.borland.com/bes/.
About Borland
Borland Software Corporation is a leading provider of technology used to develop, deploy and integrate software applications. Delivering best-in-class technology solutions dedicated to interoperability, Borland allows enterprises of all sizes to move into Web-based computing while leveraging legacy systems. From the Fortune 1000 to the Borland Developer Network comprised of millions of developers around the world, Borland provides customers the freedom to develop applications, deploy them anywhere, and integrate and manage them across the enterprise. Borland solutions enable organizations to increase productivity and deliver higher-performance projects faster and on budget, while lowering total cost of ownership.
Founded in 1983, Borland is headquartered in Scotts Valley, California with operations worldwide. To learn more, visit Borland at http://www.borland.com, the community site at http://community.borland.com, or call Borland at (800) 632-2864.
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Safe Harbor Statement
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