Rhone-Poulenc Standardizes on Delphi Client/Server Suite 2.0; Chemicals Giant Selects Borland RAD Tool for All North American Business Units

Business Wire, July 22, 1996

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 22, 1996-- Rhone-Poulenc North American Chemicals, part of Rhone-Poulenc S.A., the world's seventh-largest pharmaceutical and chemicals company, has selected Borland International's Delphi Client/Server Suite 2.0 as its standard software development environment. Delphi Client/Server Suite is being used as a rapid application development (RAD) tool to create turnkey applications for all of the company's 12 business units, which produce a wide variety of chemical products. Rhone-Poulenc chose Delphi after an exhaustive evaluation of client/server development tools. Rhone-Poulenc purchased Delphi Client/Server Suite 2.0 in April and deployed its first application in mid-June.

"We did an extensive Proof of Concept evaluation, asking each vendor to develop a test application in our environment, and Delphi was light-years ahead of the competition in terms of speed and ease-of-use," said Joe Coppa, manager of rapid application development for Rhone-Poulenc North American Chemicals' Shared Services group in Princeton, New Jersey. "Delphi also supports our strategic direction -- we can use it today to create applications in the 16-bit Windows 3.1 environment, and it will move with us as we switch to the 32-bit Windows NT client environment."

"Delphi is ideal for all companies that want to improve their operations and decision-making processes by delivering critical applications and information to their users in a more timely basis," said Michael Greenbaum, Borland's vice president of worldwide marketing. "Delphi has quickly become an industry standard because of the advantage it offers customers through code reuse and easier application maintenance. These benefits dramatically cut development time and reduce an organization s overall IT costs."

Delphi is Borland's family of high-performance RAD tools for Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows NT. Introduced in March 1996, Delphi Client/Server Suite 2.0 is winning awards and customer praise due to its suite of powerful client and server development tools that enable large corporations and government organizations to build robust, scalable applications in shorter amounts of time. Borland has recently issued an update to the Delphi Client/Server Suite that includes new Internet and Intranet development capabilities, support for third-party CASE and software testing tools, as well as significant performance enhancements.

Rhone-Poulenc's RAD Team Part of Re-engineering Effort

The selection of Delphi as Rhone-Poulenc's standard application development environment was part of a business process re-engineering effort during which the company reorganized its 75-person Information Technology department and created a RAD team. While other IT teams work in specific areas such as manufacturing and finance, the RAD team works across boundaries, identifying areas throughout the company that need software and provide turnkey solutions.

"The RAD team and our software projects are already getting a lot of attention," said Coppa. "Delphi is proving that we can do business in a different way."

Analysis Identifies Delphi as Best Solution

Rhone-Poulenc's final `Proof of Concept' report identified five major advantages to standardizing on Delphi as the front-end development tool for their Oracle database servers. The benefits for selecting Delphi were: the product s easy-to-use visual development environment, its powerful object-oriented technology, its native code compiler, product stability, and its unmatched ease-of-use.

Visual development environment -- Delphi's visual development environment showed Rhone-Poulenc programmers how much faster they could create functional prototypes. "With Delphi, you can lay out a program for a customer without writing a lot of code, Coppa said. "Delphi has a versatile Object Repository that allows us to create a prototype in a few days. We can then show it to the customer during a meeting, discuss what the customer likes and doesn't like, make changes to the prototype, and demonstrate the revised prototype right there at the same meeting."

Additionally, Rhone-Poulenc found that Delphi is the only RAD tool to provide a Visual Component Library (VCL) with source code based on object-oriented technology for writing and modifying components and dropping them into an application. Delphi also supports Microsoft's standard 16-bit VBX and 32-bit OCX components.

High Performance -- Rhone-Poulenc's evaluation proved that Delphi's powerful native code compiler would provide a key performance advantage. "Delphi is built on a solid foundation -- it's not a mish-mash of syntax," said Coppa. "It's a true compiled technology, not a run-time environment."

Stable environment -- The company's evaluation showed that Delphi's development environment and the applications it develops are much more stable than its competition, resulting in maximum "up-time" and developer productivity.

Easy to learn -- Developers found Delphi to have the lowest learning curve, reducing training costs and allowing development to progress more quickly.