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Borland feels the Eclipse pinch

Martin LaMonica Former Staff writer, CNET News
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer covering green tech and cutting-edge technologies. He joined CNET in 2002 to cover enterprise IT and Web development and was previously executive editor of IT publication InfoWorld.
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Martin LaMonica

Borland Software's recent financial report lends credence to the conventional wisdom that the Java development tools market is rapidly commoditizing.

With JBuilder, Borland had one of the first successful visual development tools, or IDEs, specifically for Java. In the company's first quarter earnings call earlier this week, however, Borland executives indicated that its JBuilder business is under attack.

Financial analysts from both Piper Jaffray and Pacific Growth Equities estimated that Borland's JBuilder revenue declined 50 percent year over year.

The cause of this decline is Eclipse, the open-source development product that's popular with Java programmers, according to these analysts.

"Over time, we believe Eclipse will continue to pressure Borland's Java business and we feel this business may eventually decline to less than 5% of total revenues," according to a Piper Jaffray report.

Borland, meanwhile, appears to see the same dynamic happening. Earlier this year, it boosted its commitment in the Eclipse open-source foundation and said that future Java development products will be based on the Eclipse framework.