"For this strategic project, we felt the flexibility of Borland products provided the best guarantee of success. Previous projects that Borland and Unisys have completed prove that Borland's development solutions work for organizations like FOD Finance," said Jean-Christopher Troussart, project manager at the Belgian Federal Public Service Finance (FOD Finance), as Borland and IT services provider Unisys in Belgium announced they have signed an agreement.

The multi-million Euro contract, with a run-time of five years, is for a project called "SupDev," part of an initiative within FOD Finance to centralize its IT and telecoms infrastructure. FOD Finance chose to use Borland's Core Software Delivery Platform (Core SDP) and Unisys' services following the results of a Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) review.

The public service provider selected Unisys and Borland to jointly provide a complete solution for Software Delivery Optimization and process optimization for this large-scale project as a result of the changes required to its IT and telecoms infrastructure and organization. Unisys and Borland will provide the solutions and consultancy required to support software development initiatives, including the support and integration of existing legacy systems.

Borland will deliver the tools needed to manage FOD Finance's application lifecycle, primarily through Borland's role-based, process-centric Core SDP platform. Mercury Interactive will provide optimization software for data testing.

Marc Frisque, customer relationship executive, public sector, at Unisys is enthusiastic about the cooperation with Borland: "This is our first project with Borland in the Belgian market, and at the same time this is one of the largest projects possible in the public sector. With 30,000 employees, FOD Finance is the biggest public service provider in Belgium. The roll-out of such a large and strategic IT and telecoms environment has a significant impact, both internally and externally."

"This Core SDP win demonstrates the demand we're seeing in the market for Software Delivery Optimization and the ongoing success we have with strategic partners like Unisys," said Nigel Brown, regional vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa at Borland. "Borland's platform independence was one of the key reasons for FOD Finance choosing our solution."