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Evolving the Business of Integration
Borland's George Paolini shares his views on integration, industry trends, and a new approach for bridging development and business requirements
by the Editors of Java Pro

October 27, 2004

Java Pro editors sat down with George Paolini, vice president and general manager of developer tools, Borland, at the Java Pro Live! Conference in mid-October for an impromptu discussion of the Java platform, Borland's approach to different technologies, and other topics. Borland is working to extend its application life-cycle management (ALM) strategy by bridging the software development environment with the business world in a process called Software Delivery Optimization (SDO). Paolini delivered a keynote at Java Pro's inaugural event (see a video of Paolini's entire keynote, "Maximizing the Business Value of Software"), where he discussed maximizing the business value of software by providing developers with the right tools, the right capabilities, and the right context to ensure that systems are built for scalability, adaptability, and maintainability.

Java Pro Online: It's generally well known that you used to be with Sun Microsystems. When you left Sun and went to Borland, were you brought on board specifically to evolve Borland's ALM strategy?

George Paolini: I came on board at Borland for my own personal growth because I wanted to run a business division. I had been in marketing and community kinds of operations at Sun for eight and a half years, and I wanted a more operational role. When I was in the process of the negotiation [with Borland] for the position, they were in the process of negotiating for acquiring Together and StarTeam. I knew what was coming and it was very exciting, so the timing for me was perfect.

Of course at the same time IBM was in the process of acquiring Rational, so you could just see the dynamics at play. I've been with [Borland] for almost two years now, and it's been exciting. There have been lots of changes this year especially, and really there have been nothing but changes since I got there. In fact, the day I started was three days after the acquisition of Together and StarTeam had taken place, so we were off and running. Obviously the company was transformed as part of that, growing into being what it is today, and providing ALM technologies. And as you know, we're taking those technologies to the next step with some major changes in which we're trying to evolve beyond the vision for ALM and moving into what we're calling SDO, or Software Delivery Optimization. What's exciting about that is that what we've done for integrating in the development environment, we want to take that and extend it beyond the development world into bridging between development and different processes. We think there's a lot of room for growth there.

Java Pro Online: Your integration technique, is that the integration that we saw demonstrated during your keynote address?

Paolini: Some of the integration that we showed today was new, and some of it is almost two years in the making. Some of the initial integration that we showed on the modeling capability we had concluded really within 30 days—hard to believe—of the acquisition of Together because we had been working as partners together for over a year before the acquisition, so it was a natural fit.

The Inevitability of Innovation
Java Pro Online: We especially liked the integration with requirements for development.

Paolini: That's what is new in this release, and the key refactoring capabilities, the distributed refactoring capabilities, those are all new technologies, but the integration with modeling, the integration with the testing environment that we showed today, we've been working on that for quite a while.

Java Pro Online: One of the interesting topics in your talk, and something that came up at our [Technology] Roundtable earlier this year, was when you mentioned standards and innovation. Do you think it's an inevitable process that companies lead with innovation and then evolve technology into standards?

Paolini: I think it is inevitable. It's the way the industry is positioned. The message I was trying to deliver to developers and customers is really [proceed] at your own risk. That is, I'm not about to espouse not adopting technologies that are on the bleeding edge, or the leading edge, or adopting them. I'm just saying that there are benefits and there are risks associated with that, and you need to be cognizant of that when you're adopting those technologies. Sometimes it gives you a competitive advantage; sometimes you get locked in on a one-way road that you can't get off of, and you just need to be aware that there is that risk involved. But it's been that way for years in the industry, and overall I think it's a healthy environment because it pushes the envelope on innovation. If companies didn't take that risk of innovating to begin with, then we'd be stagnant.