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Borland

Borland Software Corporation was a computing technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad, and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was developing and selling software development and software deployment products. Borland was first headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, then in Cupertino, California, and then in Austin, Texas. In 2009, the company became a full subsidiary of the British firm Micro Focus International plc. In 2023, Micro Focus (including Borland) was acquired by Canadian firm OpenText, which later absorbed Borland's portfolio into its application delivery management division.

Borland Ltd. was founded in August 1981 by three Danish citizens – Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad – to develop products like Word Index for the CP/M operating system using an off-the-shelf company. However, the response to the company's products at the CP/M-82 show in San Francisco showed that a U.S. company would be needed to reach the American market. They met Philippe Kahn, who had just moved to Silicon Valley and had been a key developer of the Micral. Kahn was chairman, president, and CEO of Borland Inc. at its inception in 1983 and until 1995.

The first name for the company was not Borland. It was MIT. The acronym MIT stood for "Market In Time". The name "Borland" originated from a small company in Ireland, which was one of MIT initial customers. After they went bankrupt, MIT sought permission to acquire and use the name "Borland" in the U.S., following a legal recommendation during a rebranding prompted by a letter from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

The main shareholders at the incorporation of Borland were Niels Jensen (250,000 shares), Ole Henriksen (160,000), Mogens Glad (100,000), and Kahn (80,000).[citation needed]

Borland developed various software development tools. Its first product was Turbo Pascal in 1983, developed by Anders Hejlsberg (who later developed .NET and C# for Microsoft) and before Borland acquired the product which was sold in Scandinavia under the name Compas Pascal. In 1984, Borland launched Sidekick, a time organization, notebook, and calculator utility that was an early terminate-and-stay-resident program (TSR) for MS-DOS compatible operating systems.

By the mid-1980s, the company had an exhibit at the 1985 West Coast Computer Faire along with IBM and AT&T. Bruce Webster reported that "the legend of Turbo Pascal has by now reached mythic proportions, as evidenced by the number of firms that, in marketing meetings, make plans to become 'the next Borland'". After Turbo Pascal and Sidekick, the company launched other applications such as SuperKey and Lightning, all developed in Denmark. While the Danes remained majority shareholders, board members included Kahn, Tim Berry, John Nash, and David Heller. With the assistance of John Nash and David Heller, both British members of the Borland Board, the company was taken public on London's Unlisted Securities Market (USM) in 1986.

Schroders was the lead investment banker. According to the London IPO filings, the management team was Philippe Kahn as president, Spencer Ozawa as VP of Operations, Marie Bourget as CFO, and Spencer Leyton as VP of sales and business development. All software development continued to take place in Denmark and later London as the Danish co-founders moved there. A first US IPO followed in 1989 after Ben Rosen joined the Borland board with Goldman Sachs as the lead banker and a second offering in 1991 with Lazard as the lead banker.

In 1985, Borland acquired Analytica and its Reflex database product. Forrester Research considered Borland with Analytica, Ashton-Tate, Lotus Development, and Microsoft the "Big Four" of personal computer software. The engineering team of Analytica, managed by Brad Silverberg and including Reflex co-founder Adam Bosworth, became the core of Borland's engineering team in the US. Brad Silverberg was VP of engineering until he left in early 1990 to head up the Personal Systems division at Microsoft. Adam Bosworth initiated and headed up the Quattro project until moving to Microsoft later in 1990 to take over the project which eventually became Access.

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