Telelogic to be acquired by IBM

I’ve just learned that Telelogic, one of my former employers, is to be acquired by IBM.

From 1998 till early 2000, I used to work for Verilog, a French software company (I was based in the Dallas office) that was doing pretty well with its IDE targeted at the SDL world. One fine day of December 1999, I arrived in the office, only to learn that Telelogic, the other major player in SDL, had acquired us. Telelogic was no worse, nor better that Verilog (though certainly more commercially aggressive), but I needed a change and in April, I went back to Europe and joined Valtech (in London for a few years, then Paris).

When we were at Verilog, we used to worry about Telelogic (which we thought was using disloyal means to take business from us), and also, though less, about Rational (for its real-time software IDE), i-Logix, and a few others.

Well, Telelogic snapped Verilog, then i-Logix (among others). IBM acquired Rational (among many others), and now Telelogic.

It’s a strange feeling to hear about a company you used to work for. It’s a bit like hearing about long-lost high school friends: how did they do? and, inevitably, did I do any better?

Every now and then, I come across people that used to work for Telelogic, including the project manager of my current consulting gig at EDF, and Pascal Roques, a UML guru and a colleague at Valtech (the proverbial small world).