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.
Philippe Kahn taught mathematics at the University of Nice and Grenoble left France for the United States in 1982 with $2,000 in savings and settled in Silicon Valley in California.
Philippe Kahn together with Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad founded Borland Software Corporation in 1983. Borland Software Corporation became a leading supplier of requirement, testing and change management solutions.
Kahn contributed the remnants of his own savings to the new enterprise and rounded up $18,000 from other sources. The company rented a two-room office over a Jaguar garage for $600 a month.
Philippe Kahn was the Chairman, President and CEO until 1985. Kahn built a powerful software company from the ground up with a series of brilliant business moves, including the 1991 acquisition of Ashton-Tate, one of the software industry’s biggest companies, for $440 million.
The first product launches was Turbo Pascal, initially developed by Anders Hejlsberg. In 1984, saw the launch of SideKick, a time organization, notebook and calculator utility.
The company acquired the Paradox database from Ansa Software in 1987 in addition to dBASE and Interbase from Ashton-Tate in 1991. It made Borland the leader in PC databases in the early 1990s.
In 1998, Borland announced it had become Inprise Corporation. The move was intended to build out the company's product line in the face of competition from Microsoft Corp. and Lotus Development Corp. For a number of years (both before and during the Inprise name) Borland suffered from serious financial losses and very poor public image. In fact when the name was changed to Inprise many thought Borland went out of business. The name was changed back to Borland on January 2, 2001,.
Borland was acquired by Micro Focus International for $75 million in 2009. Micro Focus continues to support the needs of software teams who must rapidly adapt to the increasing volume and velocity of evolving business requirements. The company is noted for its language and development products.
Borland Software Corporation
