Borland's developer tools unit, Codegear, is now vying for a new lease of life after languishing on the sales block for more than six months now. Data management and admin tools vendor Embarcadero Technologies has announced it was buying CodeGear from Borland for the fire sale price of $23 million.

According to a community letter from David Intersimone, Vice President, Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist, "Embarcadero and CodeGear have similar cultures, complementary product lines, and complementary geographic footprints. We also have a technology integration history. In 2001, Embarcadero had tool integration with JBuilder. We also have customers and past employees in common. We both have products supporting native code, managed code, dynamic languages, and database development. Both companies have products that support heterogeneous databases, the Eclipse framework, and Microsoft Windows. Both companies’ products use modeling for application/data/process visual design and archeology".

What does this mean for Codegear? According to Burton Group Research Director Peter O'Kelly, "Dev shops that use JBuilder, C++ Builder, Delphi and the new PHP and Ruby tools can feel more confident that those tools will continue to be supported and refined. CodeGear, in short, has a future again."

what does this mean for Embracadero? Embarcadero will now be able to provide broader support and deeper functionality across the software development lifecycle and harness the goodness in CodeGear's engineering teams to solve some of the exciting challenges facing the developer ecosystem: enabling effective data-driven application modeling and deployment.

CodeGear or Embarcadero is not represented at India's biggest summit for the Developer Ecosystem - Great Indian Developer Summit 2008 (http://www.developersummit.com/) to be held at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, from May 19-23 2008.