Newly appointed Borland CEO Tod Nielsen (pictured) recently spoke with SYS-CON Media's West Coast Bureau Chief Roger Strukhoff about the opportunities his new job and how his background equips him for it.  Some highlights of the interview include:

Strukhoff: What do you see as the basic and core strengths of Borland today?

Nielsen: I think that Borland has a bunch of strengths..I was talking to a friend of mine and he said ‘You know Tod, one of the great things about Borland is that everybody in the industry still wants Borland to win. There’s a positive association, a positive attribute to that brand, and when it comes to software development, and developers and the whole process of great software – Borland has a positive association with that in the customers, and in the industry’s mind.’

Strukhoff: Certainly (Borland) has a long pedigree and history, and a lot of mindshare I think amongst developers. So what do you bring to the table as CEO from the management experience that you gained at Microsoft, (Oracle), and BEA?

Nielsen: You know, I think that I was actually born for this job.

When you look at what I’ve done as far as working with the software development community, meeting customers needs, meeting with enterprise customers, understanding the importance of heterogeneous platforms and supporting all the different environments and challenges that are facing our customers today, and then you look at my experience as a leader, and public speaker, and willing to be decisive, and to take charge, and to say that ‘we’re going to go take the hill, and do what it takes to win.’ The bottom line is that Borland is ready to win, and to win big, and I’m here to help make that happen.

There are a lot of things that I learned from my time at Microsoft, and at BEA, and at Oracle, and there’s certainly similarities. I think that one of the similarities is the focus on customers, and customer’s success. When I look at the loyal customer base, be they developers, or software architects, or business analysts that are supporting the Borland franchise, that’s an amazingly loyal base, and Microsoft I think experiences some similar attributes, and the same with BEA and the WebLogic community. That’s been one similarity.

Strukhoff: Do you see any sort of unique synergy between Borland and BEA for example or between Borland and any other major software company?

Nielsen: I think that Borland has synergy with a lot of software companies. Let’s take an example of open source. At Borland’s developer conference this week, we’re showing some of the work that we’re doing with the Eclipse community, and how our product is integrating there. Yesterday, Microsoft’s launch of the next version of Visual Studio, we talked about how our product line integrates well, and supports the Microsoft environment. So, I think that one of our unique strengths as a company is that we’re independent, and we support a heterogeneous set of platforms, so whatever the particular vendor of choice is, a customer or developer is using there’s a logical place for Borland to support their efforts.

The full interview can be found on SYS-CON.TV.