Ajay Mohan

A year after its entry in the country, Borland India has an installed base of close to thousand seats of its JBuilder IDE (Integrated Development Environment) software. Interestingly, JBuilder’s competition in India isn’t another IDE, but Windows Notepad. “Programmers are using text editors for coding. Large Java shops have not moved to adopting IDEs,” says Ajay Mohan, director, sales and marketing, Borland India.

The company plans to get Java programmers in India to switch over to JBuilder. The IDE comes in three flavours personal edition (which is free), standard edition (commercial IDE priced at $399), and the top-of-the-line enterprise edition (priced at $2,999). The enterprise edition, which offers collaborative features for team development, in addition to several version control systems, has proved to be the most popular of the three with Indian companies. Borland is pitching features like application lifecycle management that are part and parcel of its IDE and its ability to conduct modelling, development and testing in a single environment. A heartening trend for the company is the increasing use of EJB, which currently accounts for 17-18 percent of all Java code, and is expected to rise to 60 percent soon, says Mohan.

Borland India will be targeting the education and wireless application development markets this year. On the global front it has Nokia and Ericsson as its clients, while in India it has been selling largely to ISVs, departments of some banking and financial institutions, and telecom companies. The company will be launching its learning partners programme in the next three months. It will also be offering JBuilder certification. These developments should encourage programmers to test JBuilder’s capabilities, adds Mohan.