Micro Focus Spending $155 Million For Borland, Compuware ToolsMicro Focus Spending $155 Million For Borland, Compuware Tools

Micro Focus on Wednesday said it has agreed to buy application life-cycle management vendor Borland and the application testing software of Compuware, bolstering Micro Focus' market position as a maker of software tools.

Under the deals, Micro Focus would pay $75 million in cash for Borland and $80 million in cash for Compuware's tools for application testing and for automated monitoring of software quality. The Borland deal, which requires shareholder approval on both sides, is expected to close by early in the third quarter. The Compuware agreement is expected to resolve itself by the end of June.

Micro Focus, based in the United Kingdom with U.S. headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., has its roots in Cobol application development tools for the mainframe. However, over the last three years, the company has been expanding its portfolio with application testing and quality management tools, making five related acquisitions since 2006.

For Borland, the deal marks the end of a Silicon Valley technology company co-founded by tech icon Philippe Kahn in 1983 as a maker of software development tools. Six years later, the company launched its Quattro Pro spreadsheet, which failed against Microsoft Excel. By the late 1990s, Borland refocused its efforts on application development, but was forced to spin off the division in 2006 in order to focus on application lifecycle management products.

Compuware said it's selling its software testing and quality management products in order to focus its resources on software related to application performance, mainframe utilization, and IT portfolio management.

Early this year, Micro Focus launched Enterprise Cloud Services, making its tools available over the Internet. Part of the launch enabled enterprise Cobol apps to run on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, which opens the retailer's servers and storage as a platform for running Web applications.

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