It is that time of the year again when we celebrate and thank our families, colleagues, and customers. Being a global company, we have to acknowledge that many of these sentiments vary greatly from country to country, but technology has brought us all closer together and allows us to share more and to relate more closely to one another. Embarcadero continues to make excellent progress in our many initiatives, and for that, we are grateful to our customers, our community, and our many partners!
10.3.3 Is Out!
We have another update to 10.3 that has been received with a lot of enthusiasm. While the big items are related to Delphi, I have seen multiple positive comments about the improvements with C++Builder, which is fantastic to hear. I think that with these updates, 10.3 (with its three updates) has become one of our most outstanding releases in recent years. Kudos to our tireless PM team, our Architects and Partners, as well as our MVPs who constantly provide excellent feedback for the evolution of our product roadmap. While we are already busy with 10.4, our vision for more seamless upgrades makes 10.3.3 a milestone release for upgrades.
InterBase 2020
We released a new, exciting version of InterBase. It is surprising that there are still RAD Studio customers who are unfamiliar with how easy it is to use and develop with IB from RAD Studio. You may have noticed a bit more content around this, and that is in response to this finding. InterBase is a great product for embedded databases and is very cost-efficient, especially if you use enterprise features. We have very attractive pricing for OEM / VAR usage, so I encourage you to explore it. With Aqua Data Studio as a development environment, InterBase is definitely one of the leading products in this space.
Delphi for Education
This is a huge focus area for us. The official launch of LearnDelphi.org will come shortly with an initial set of resources and a framework to continue to build on. It will also make requesting academic licenses easier, as the demand continues to grow. Thanks to our global partners, more students will be learning Delphi! I want to note specifically two exciting developments. In Hungary, our partners Ker-Soft, Kft. worked with leading universities to adopt Delphi and also sponsor it for many, many high schools. In Turkey, with the untiring support of BTG (Bilgi ve Teknoloji Grubu), the Ministry of Education has adopted Delphi for 15 different official vocational school courses, which will be taught in 1,600+ vocational schools and is expected to reach over 600,000 students. Wow! This is on top of continued progress in countries like South Africa and New Zealand and the huge developer markets in Russia and Brazil. We are also seeing nice pick-up in some universities in the US.
Support Content in Documentation Wiki
Updating and optimizing our infrastructure is a continuous effort. We are admittedly moving slower than we would love, but we have a lot going on. However, we are making some progress that I hope you would appreciate. When we modernized our Community Portal, we made some decisions to include support articles there that we realize were not optimal. They are difficult to find and not logically structured. Our Documentation team has taken over this content and will integrate it in the Wiki with multi-language support. They did a nice job of updating the Wiki itself over the summer, and I think that the integration of the support content there will be welcomed. We are also cleaning up the support portal UX that I am sure will also be appreciated.
Delphi @ 25
We have a big anniversary coming in February. It is a lot to celebrate, especially for the community that has been loyal to Delphi and has been tirelessly supporting its development. We have planned some fun campaigns to promote Delphi and RAD Studio. Most importantly, we need your success stories. We brought back Cool Apps (remember, not just pretty apps) and will continue to solicit interesting examples. We know that you are busy, but please contribute—this helps everyone.
I want to thank everyone for being part of our community. We are committed to making Delphi and RAD Studio awesome. Let’s make the next few months a joint celebration of something that we all love!