IDERA’s intention for Embarcadero’s development tools

I just received the email below from IDERA\Embarcadero. Overall it means they plan on moving forward with Delphi and the other development tools in their portfolio.

I wanted to share the news in case you haven’t heard.
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Customer and Partner Welcome from IDERA

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am Randy Jacops, the CEO of IDERA, Inc. You likely saw the press announcement of IDERA’s recent acquisition of Embarcadero Technologies. Here is a link to the announcement if you have not seen it.

We welcome you to the IDERA family and look forward to continuing Embarcadero’s history of market leading products for data professionals and developers. I’m writing this letter to introduce IDERA and explain why we are excited to own Embarcadero.

IDERA serves over 10,000 customers around the world with performance monitoring solutions for databases, applications and technology infrastructure. We believe database professionals have an outsize impact on overall technology performance and describe our focus as database-centric. Our products enable rapid identification and remediation of performance problems across the technology stack as well as providing unique security and compliance capability.

I became CEO in 2013 and during my tenure have focused the company on long-term customer relationships built on innovation, quality, and ease of use. I strongly believe a successful software company starts with a focus on driving customer success via:

    High quality software – complete testing with significant automated code coverage
    Ease of use – simplified user experience, particularly the install/upgrade process
    Application speed – minimal wait time, robust scalability, and real-time analytics

A software company that delivers these metrics will have generally happy customers. Delivering prioritized innovation and features on a reliable schedule advances the relationship from generally happy to customer success. IDERA prioritizes investment to reflect these goals and we will apply the same philosophy to Embarcadero’s products.

As you know, Embarcadero has two unique product families: 1) heterogeneous database modeling, administration, and performance and 2) application development solutions for multiple platforms. Over the years, Embarcadero also built a roster of over 10,000 customers and millions of users, serving nearly the entire Global 2000. Embarcadero operates globally with offices and partners in nearly every major country.

Embarcadero’s database modeling, administration, and performance tools complement IDERA’s products with minimal overlap in functionality and business purpose. By combining the two businesses, we will offer data professionals a comprehensive solution to manage, deploy, and protect data across the company. We will seek customer feedback on integration between the solutions to ensure we adhere to our core product values of simplicity of use, quality, and scalability.

For Embarcadero’s development tools, we acknowledge this is a new opportunity for IDERA. I have seen some chatter on our community forums and received direct questions from customers on IDERA’s intentions for the product line. I wish to emphasize the tremendous value we perceive in development tools. As applications proliferate across multiple channels and platforms, the need for tools to build the next generation of applications will soar. Concepts such as the Internet of Things or proximity awareness in applications did not exist several years ago. Today, everybody recognizes the opportunity in building applications for equipment that simplifies and advances society. We believe the winners in the application development market will focus on the developer and differentiate with speed to market, ease of use, and pace of change. All of these things perfectly align with IDERA’s view of product and customer success.

To that end, we formed a new leadership team that will focus exclusively on Embarcadero’s development tools and growing the business via innovations and opportunistic M&A. Atanas Popov, a longtime colleague of mine, has joined Embarcadero to lead the team. Atanas will focus his attention on growing the business and investing to attract more customers to our solutions. We believe there is significant opportunity in Embarcadero’s development tools and we look forward to working with you to prioritize our investments.

Finally, Embarcadero invested for years to build a robust and reliable reseller/partner network. Many companies aspire to building such a network but the time and effort required eventually discourages most. However, if a company perseveres and delivers a healthy reseller and partner business, the impact and potential is significant. Embarcadero has dozens of active and significant global partners. Maintaining a healthy reseller/partner network requires more and better product and a steady stream of potential customers interested in buying. We expect to introduce IDERA’s broader product family to Embarcadero’s partners and also plan to leverage IDERA’s talented marketing team to refine messaging and advance dialogue with prospects. We believe some modest changes and investment will expand the universe of opportunities for our partners who serve a global customer base.

From an ongoing communication standpoint, we believe in publishing our product roadmaps to active customers and maintaining dialogue with customers interested in contributing. We believe user communities deliver significant customer value and will continue investing appropriately. We also believe that change facilitates innovation and increases value for our customers. We will remain committed to these principles and look forward to working with you to improve every day and help you capture expected value.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact me directly (randy.jacops@idera.com). With over 20,000 customers, it’s not practical to maintain a direct dialogue with every customer, but we will respond to questions. Most importantly, we will communicate future product roadmap reviews, webinars, and related content you will find interesting. I encourage you to participate in all these sessions to ensure a mutually valuable relationship.

Thank you for your business and I look forward to the future.

Regards,

Randy Jacops
CEO, IDERA, Inc.

10 comments:

  1. Lots of words and chatter...

    This could go 2 ways:

    Will it be like when Steve Jobs returned to Apple after NeXt and turned a dying company into the biggest thing in computer tech?

    or Will it be like when Escom bought the Amiga from a failed Commodore and we all know what happened to the best multitasking OS of the 80s...

    I wish that Randy Jacops takes a look at the RAD codebase, and really checks out what the communities are saying, so he can straighten up the current "devs" that work on RAD and maybe starts with a clean slate. Put a "down to earth" price on RAD, invest time in the C++ RAD, and make FMX use real NATIVE gui not the emulated layer we have today.... So many things to do....

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  2. Sounds good. Now for a updated Delphi roadmap

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  3. I agree on the "down to earth price" for Delphi and C++ Builder.
    I would like to see the database tools more integrated into the IDE.

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  4. I am not sure whether this is good or bad... Idera is focused on database tools not on developers.
    It would be really sad if further development is cut...

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  5. RAD Studio is obscenely overpriced, and everyone knows it. Embarcadero's pricing schemes are DIRECTLY responsible for the rapidly diminishing relevance of Delphi. Hopefully Idera will assign some actually sane people to the developer tools division, who will be able to discern that collectively throwing their wallets into a fire would be a better long-term investment than continuing on the path RAD Studio is on now.

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  6. I wrote to Randy and he responded that "...chances of our not protecting and appreciating the products are zero". And that they plan to "..grow the business...".

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  7. Irrespective of Idera's intentions, if the current price remains, there will be no significant growth in usage (ie. sales), which in turn will reflect in Idera's attitude to RAD. Pretty simple really, every company invests in those products that generate the greatest profit.

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  8. But with (too) few developers with the current price level will it be very difficult. A friendly price attracts many new customers.

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  9. Idera needs to bring fresh ideas to Embarcodero. Although EMB has done some good things for Delphi there is a lot of room for improvement. They desperately need to attract new developers instead of milking the old.

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