David Intersimone "David I", CodeGear's Vice President of Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist, hosted a community conversation on 5/22/2008 with CodeGear community members, CodeGear CEO Jim Douglas and Embarcadero Technologies CEO Wayne Williams.
The two CEOs discussed details of the recent announcement, what it means to CodeGear and Embarcadero customers and partners, what the two companies can accomplish together in creating the largest independent software company focused on the design, development, management, and optimization of applications and their databases. Below, you will find the replay of the event, as well as the Q&A transcript.
Q&A transcript
Q:
davidi asked: "From Dan Armano: Will you continue the development of Delphi for PHP?"
A:
Yes, we just shipped v2 of Delphi for PHP. Development is continuing for future releases.
Q:
davidi asked: "From Brazil: What can CodeGear community members expect from Embarcadero, in terms of investment in the IDE products?"
A:
Wayne: Before Embarcadero went private, we had a change in direction to focus on large deals. We spent a lot of R&D time in that area, and that focus didn't work at all. We realized it just in time. We love the tools, and turned the ship to focus on building the tools. We have twice the R&D capacity that we had before. I would expect that same focus for CodeGear tools, to be focused on development.
Q:
davidi asked: "From Brazil: are there any plans to include ER/Studio in Delphi?"
A:
Jim: this is definitely an opportunity we will explore. ER/Studio and Delphi are just the tip of the iceberg.
Q:
davidi asked: "From Brad: I haven’t heard any news about what Jim Douglas’ status will be post-merger. Hopefully he will still be in the picture for awhile."
A:
Jim: my current focus is ensuring continuity and making sure the new company can hit the ground running, but I'd love to be involved in this business in the future.
Q:
davidi asked: "From Serge: I know that the IBM AS/400 market is not a target for Embarcadero today. I would like to know if Embarcadero will consider this market and will continue the efforts of CodeGear in the System i modernization market with Delphi/400?"
A:
wayne: embt has support right now for the IBM mainframe market in some of our products. We've certainly looked at the AS/400 market. We're very interested in it, and the fact that CodeGear is there already is great news.
Q:
davidi asked: "From: Richard Winston: CodeGear appears to be focusing on independent software vendors and small teams. Borland's ALM business appears to be focused on large team efforts and so is a mismatch for CodeGear's emphasis. What sort of customer does Embarcadero focus on and how does that make Embarcadero a better fit with CodeGear than CodeGear was with Borland?"
A:
Jim: One thing in terms of our business -- we actually work with developers at all sizes of companies. CodeGear typically sells into work groups, where Borland focused on "traditional enterprise" sales. CodeGear has always been focused on the developer. Wayne: That enterprise heavyweight sales cycle is certainly a direction we tried to go. It was a mistake [for us] and we realized it. We will continue to focus on selling tools to developers.
Q:
davidi asked: "From Jose Araujo: Many Brazilian Delphi Developers are thinking that Delphi is OVER. What can you tell the Delphi community to make them feel that Delphi has a future?"
A:
Wayne: I can tell you that Delphi is absolutely not over. I personally love the product and have used it for many years. It's clearly the best RAD tool for building native Windows apps and it's a fantastic business. It's an anchor product with a very large and loyal customer base. We're going to continue to innovate, move the products forward, and attract more and more users. Jim: I love this question. If you look at applications around the world, the need for native applications is not going away. There's this great part of the market that will always need native applications.
Q:
davidi asked: "From Didier Gasser Morlay: Delphi has always been database agnostic allowing connection to closed and Open-source databases either directly or via 3rd party components; Will Embarcadero products 'embark' (pun intended) on the support of the open-source (PostgreSQL/MySQL/FireBird to name a few) boat ?"
A:
Wayne: We listen to our customers and when a particular platform has reached a threshold level we add support for it. The support will vary by product.
Q:
davidi asked: "From m.Th.: Embarcadero is a strong player in data designing area, CodeGear is a strong player in providing tools in data processing using programming language elements. Do you have plans to provide solutions in data visualization/business intelligence area? I think about OLAP, data-cubes, data-mining, drill-down features also."
A:
Wayne: Visualization is critical. Both groups are very passionate about this. LiveSource and UML modeling is a big piece for CodeGear, and ER Modeling is critical for Embarcadero. One of the strengths of Delphi is visualization. Expect to see much more visualization in the future.
Q:
davidi asked: "From m.Th.: How do you see the community's role in the shaping process of your products?"
A:
Wayne: The more contact and interaction the company has with our users the better.
Q:
davidi asked: "From Patrick Moloney: Please say something about the plans or commitment for InterBase - or lack thereof."
A:
Wayne: This is an area where I'm still trying to get my head
around the opportunities. I think there are tons of opportunities for it, and it's obvious it's a great business right now. It's a great database engine to use right out of the box. We absolutely will continue it, and we think there are some bigger opportunities for it.
Q:
davidi asked: "From Brazil: Does Embarcadero plan to make changes to the Product Road Maps, putting out more information and more aggressive plans?"
A:
Wayne: There's really two questions here. As far as Embarcadero goes, our process for product roadmaps won't change.
Christine Ellis: We will only have time to answer questions related to the CodeGear acquisition. Unfortunately, we will not be able to answer your Delphi or other product related technical questions during this chat session.
Q:
davidi asked: "From Brazil: What the future of C++, considering that in the last few years CodeGear didn’t have as high a priority for this product?"
A:
Wayne: The future of C++ is certainly strong. There's a ton of C++ development out there. That's a great market for us, and some pretty exciting things coming up for the next RAD Studio release.
Jim: it's absolutely fair to be critical of our lapse in C++ support in the last few years. We absolutely plan to push forward and have pretty exciting C++ solutions coming up in RAD Studio 2008, including embracing some of the new C++ standards. We can certainly do more for marketing our C++ solution. You should have seen a change in our C++ offering last year.
Q:
davidi asked: "From Brazil: Are there plans to discontinue any CodeGear or Embarcadero products?"
A:
Wayne: no
Q:
davidi asked: "From Brazil: When the acquisition is completed, who will take care of business here in Brazil since Embarcadero does not a local office here?"
A:
Wayne: We're still in the planning stage. No specific decisions made yet. It's certainly an important region for both lines of business.
Q:
woof asked: "does the buy out see any changes to the plans for the next release of the studio product?"
A:
No changes, except for maybe some opportunities with the combined companies and technologies.
Q:
adrianosantospro asked: "I'd like to know what will happen to CodeGear's partners and also about the certifications for Delphi and other tools ."
A:
Partner programs will continue. Learning products and certifications will continue.
Q:
davidi asked: "From several: Is there any relationship to the value of the acquisition ($23m+$7m receivables) and what Embarcadero and CodeGear will be able to accomplish together?"
A:
Wayne: I don't really tie those two together. The way we look at it is, we brought a great asset. A great company with great people and great products that are well aligned with embt. The value in the asset is clear and obvious. As far as the individual transaction goes, I think this is a great time to be a buyer whether you're talking about assets like this or real-estate. As far as what we can do together, our biggest challenge is picking our key directions because we have so many opportunities for where we could go. Jim: There is an extremely high valuation on this business. EMBT got a great deal on this business and are in a great position moving forward to focus on delivering great technology. This deal also reflects very well on Wayne and EMBT.
Q:
jkaster asked: "From David Boventer: Are you going to be active within the Micro ISV community and continue the support of the CodeGear IDE at conferences such as the SIC taking place in July in the US and the European Software Conference, taking place in November in Berlin, Germany?"
A:
Delphi and C++ are focused on enterprise, small business, ISV and Micro ISV customers. Specifically for Micro ISV community, we will continue to add capabilities for ISVs/Micro ISVs.
David I will be at SIC this year again in the US.
Q:
davidi asked: "From m.Th.: Are you considering synchronizing the metadata changes between actual database schema and its representation in the programming language?"
A:
Wayne: Absolutely. We have active work going on in that area.
Q:
woof asked: "Will the technology partner remain the same"
A:
Yes
Q:
sadosy1972 asked: "Will CG move to SF from current location, or would here be a new location altogether?"
A:
CodeGear will stay in Scotts Valley and it's other locations.
Q:
corelab asked: "Are your planing to develop some new data access technologies in CodeGear IDEs?"
A:
Work continues on next generations of dbExpress and also DataSnap.
Q:
woof asked: "Does the platform independent streak mean we may see a return of Delphi for Linux?"
A:
Wayne: I'm still getting my head around a lot of these things. Platform independence is critical, so the concept of targeting multiple operating systems is certainly one we invest in R&D to service.
Q:
jmrsoftware asked: "Will the IDE products lose the CodeGear brand and take on the Embarcadero brand? It took a lot of effort to establish the CodeGear brand."
A:
Wayne: We're still working on these plans. Obviously, we're one company: EMBT. The use of brands is really descriptive and a way to group products.
Q:
corelab asked: "are there any plans about changing partnership programs in any way?"
A:
no changes. planning is still moving forward.
Q:
corelab asked: "are there any plans about changing partnership programs in any way?"
A:
Wayne: I don't see any changes.
Q:
piditmiller asked: "are you going to ask any of the questions we have already mailed in?"
A:
We have been. Thanks!
Q:
alchemist42 asked: "Will the deal cause any further delays in the release of Tiburon?"
A:
No
Q:
davidwr50 asked: "Will support for InterBase 2007 (and other later versions) and Blackfish be added to ER Studio."
A:
Embarcadero is looking at additional integrations. You can use ODBC today.
Q:
jachguate asked: "Do you have plans to maintain (or revive) Turbo editions?"
A:
Yes
Q:
obones asked: "Are there any plans to make Delphi and other CodeGear products more visible in the specialized press especially in Europe?"
A:
Wayne: Nigel Brown [a Borland and CodeGear alumni] really opened our eyes to the European market and we're pushing forward in that marketplace.
Q:
dmb21 asked: "What tools does embarcadero use to develop its products?"
A:
Wayne: one of the things I'm really impressed with is Team Insight from JBuilder, and EMBT will definitely be using that.
Q:
monien asked: "So far I only found references to InterBase 4 on Embarcadero’s product spec pages. IB is a bit outdated, so can we expect IB to become one of the "fully" supported DBMS'? Or maybe even Blackfish?"
A:
Check Andreano Lanusse's blog entries about how you can use InterBase with Embarcadero's products today. More planning is being done.
Q:
didiergm asked: "After several years of uncertainty, time is of essence. Do you set yourself a time limit to announce the plans post finalization of the acquisition?”
A:
Wayne: Agreed time is of the essence. In general, we're moving as fast as we can.
Q:
m_theologos asked: "Usually, adding men to a project produces a delay for a while. How do you see the cooperation between CodeGear & Embarcadero teams in this regard?"
A:
We are working on integration plans. There is a lot of work to be done, and the teams are starting the communications and integrations.
Q:
jachguate asked: "Latin-America is a large market with a lot of opportunities and future for all of your products. We want to know what about the plans of Embarcadero to stay and step-forward in this area."
A:
Wayne: The issue here is international growth and this is key to any business now. That's where the majority of our growth will be.
Q:
corelab asked: "Is there any plans for future development of ADO and BDE technologies?"
A:
No plans to do anything with BDE. dbExpress will continue to evolve to support multiple databases and APIs.
Q:
davidi asked: "From Francoise Pascal: Will the new company offer language packages for its IDE software as Borland and CodeGear did in the past for the great pleasure of German, French and Japanese developers?"
A:
Wayne: This is an area where EMBT has not been as aggressive as CodeGear has. We're looking to learn something here and do better. We've localized certain products to certain languages but haven't had a consistent approach. We have an initiative under way for French and German.
Q:
primarypower asked: "Delphi will continue to be improved also on non-database field? I mean that, it will have a 64bit platform, and maybe multi platform development (for Linux, Mac..) or Embarcadero will focus the development on the database field?"
A:
David: 64-bit is on our roadmap for Delphi.
Q:
mihaela.mj asked: "Any plans on implementing LINQ in Delphi?"
A:
Stay tuned for additional .NET support in the future.
Q:
didiergm asked: "On general terms will E.T. open it's product line other DBs (InterBase) and open source Databases "
A:
Wayne already answered this. The answer is Embarcadero already supports MySQL and other databases. More to come.
Q:
rolandoefren asked: "Documentation, level by level, step by step tutorials to consolidate the use the tools in the developers community around the world... ¿Are they coming?"
A:
Our documentation team has made tremendous strides in improving the documentation for all our products. An example can be seen at
http://docs.codegear.com.
Q:
dmb21 asked: "I'm wondering if the acquisition has had any effect on the release plans of the next Delphi/C++ builder... "
A:
No impacts, no delays.
Q:
didiergm asked: "thanks for taking the time to talk to the community"
A:
You're very welcome and thanks for joining us today!
Q:
jmrsoftware asked: "Delphi has to compete with Visual Studio's competitive price point. Will Embarcadero change, either lower or raise, the price point of the CodeGear IDE tools?"
A:
We constantly take a look at pricing, products, editions of our products.
Q:
m_theologos asked: "How do you think to tackle the suddenly growth of a community with 3.2 mio users with a different history, mindset etc.? Will you try to leverage their knowledge?"
A:
In my meetings with Wayne, he is absolutely committed to continuing our community efforts, customer outreach, and leveraging your help in moving our combined company and products forward.
Q:
nicole+boivin asked: "This was an excellent webinar. Sounds like a 'blessed marriage. Will the OTAPI be better documented going forward? Thanks guy."
A:
Thank You.
Q:
kmylon asked: "I don't know what you've done to the sound, but it's gone from the unusable mush I have had in past InterWise conferences to today's "Clear as a bell". Many thanks. KM."
A:
Thank you - I think it was a combination of using slides/microphones instead of pre-recorded videos. Also we are using v8.2.20 of the AT&T client, maybe which also had something to do with it.
