Right. I had a meeting with a significant customer to tell [him] what's going on. His response was great: "I want you guys to continue to focus up and focus on owning the boardroom. I don't want to hear about features. I don't want you in the weeds, I want you up solving the problems so that from the boardroom I can see what's going on in my software development investments."

And we hear that over and over again—maybe in different articulations, but the same message from our core customers.

Jackson: Our hope is that as we identify the new owner for the IDE business that we will establish an immediate partnership with them and as we are designing our ALM technology, our whole design goal is that you should be able to take an IDE of choice and plug it into the environment so that as developer[s are] working, they are getting access to the other assets that support the life cycle, and all of their actions are going into the data capture system.

So we believe that we'll continue to work with our JBuilder customers and the Pelaton customers.

So somebody's taking all the IDE stuff?

The announcement we're making is we've had some inquires from third parties who have said they are interested in buying this business. And we've always said, "No thanks." Now we're saying it is our intent to divest from this business. We don't have the buyer picked yet, but the commitment we're making to our community is we're going to make sure that it goes into a world that you will be taken care of and invested in. Fly, be free, is sort of the thing I say.

So will it necessarily be one vendor to take all the products?

The assumption is it will be because there's so much synergy between those communities that I can't imagine it being multiple vendors. And the interest that's come to us has been along the lines of a single company.

Was this move necessary because you were bleeding so badly from the IDE business that you had to get rid of it?

No, it's not a matter of bleeding, it's a matter of focus. For instance, in marketing, Rick wears one hat that says I'm focused on the enterprise. The other hat is I have a channel-based business where I'm slinging boxes and making things happen. I'm doing two completely different things and I have two different organizations. And it's almost like Borland was becoming two companies. And we're not big enough to be two companies; we need to be one focused company.

It's absolutely a healthy, vibrant business. We just had to make a choice.

What kind of impact do you think this move will have on Borland's mindshare with developers? Borland has always had a big community following.

If you look at the Borland I used to think of prior to coming here that was certainly a core contingent and focus. But if you think about it, the most common statement when you talk to people about Borland is: "Gosh, Borland. What have you been doing the last 10 years?"

So when I got here and spent time with customers I found out that there's a core set of customers who identify us with ALM, and then there's our Delphi and JBuilder folks, [who] had us in another bucket.

So our hope is that we'll develop some clarity that hey, we're hanging onto our developer roots and we're expanding it. Much like Microsoft evolved from DOS to Windows, we're evolving from IDEs to the full software development process.

Well, there's still that mindset out there that Borland is an IDE company.

Absolutely. But the interesting thing is that community is vibrant and contained, but it's not growing. And it's very loyal.

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