There is a real opportunity here for us to change the software world again and get back to the role that Borland once had as far as being a software innovator. And I'm doing everything I can to get us back to do that. Everyday I drive to work, I drive by Apple because they're just across the street. And I think about how they went through the heyday and then they went through the valley of the shadow of death, and now they're back. And it's an inspiration to say we can do that.

Sure, there are some comparisons, but that's maybe not the best analogy because what brought Apple back was new and sexy stuff, and requirements management is kind of stodgy.

Well, it depends on your perspective. Transforming software development is sexy. It's the one untapped area of IT. It's tackling the weakest link. That's sexy. Now if you want to say how we do it with specific features, OK …

Right, like process.

Yeah, process is not really sexy, but the interesting thing is as an industry we hold up the spend-the-night-under-your-desk, pizza-eating guys as heroes, but businesses can't achieve success that way. What that's done is caused them to be over budget and unpredictable. We're turning it into a managed business process. And the CIOs we meet with, when we show them what we can do for them—it's as sexy as the iPod is to any teenager.

What kind of hit to headcount do you anticipate?

Well, part of it depends on how much the [company that buys the IDE business] decides they want. Do they just want the engineers, or do they want the engineers and some of the channel sales people, etc. A lot of it's going to depend on who the suitor is and how much of the IDE business they want.

But the absolute commitment we're making to our customers is that their products' ecosystem continues and thrives.

These moves indicate you've certainly had a busy early tenure here at Borland. How have things been otherwise?

I've been here for 75 days and one of the things I did early on is I set up 100 one-on-ones with various people in the company to find out what was going on. And one of the things that I found was the core management team before I got here spent a lot of time laying the groundwork for what Borland needs to do. And in addition to spending time with employees, I spent time with customers. And whenever I talked to customers they said the weakest link in every IT organization is the dysfunctional software development process. No one's really solved that.

And we've been focusing on application lifecycle management. One of the things I got from employees is we need some focus and clarity as far as what do we want to be when we grow up.

When you look at the 24-year history of Borland, the core history has all been about software development. When Philippe [Kahn, Borland's founder] did his little thing where he expanded to try to take on Microsoft and get into business apps, he failed. Then you look at what Del Yocam tried to do with Inprise and said we're not going to be software development, we're going to be runtime. He left the heritage and failed.

So we're making it very clear to our employees, customers, partners and the world that we are serious in this application lifecycle space.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.