IBM Rational and WebSphere Strategies

The Editor — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:41:08 +0000

I attended last week a conference in Geneva where IBM was presenting the strategy for its Rational and WebSphere software development solutions. If you consider IBM as a hardware company, you should realize that today services is the most important revenue sector and software is the most important source of income. Currently, IBM focus is on aligning IT (and software development) with business goals and this objective impact also the strategy of its software development solutions.

For WebSphere, the most important point is the recent acquisition of Ilog by IBM. Ilog has a strong solution for business rules management and the goal of IBM is to push this product to its existing customers and improve the positioning of WebSphere in Business Process Management. As both companies were already partners, there are no specific product integration issues. On the other end of the market, IBM is fighting RedHat’s JBoss with the free WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, pledging to offer competitive support prices for organizations that need it. There was also a presentation of the sMash, a product that allows to create rapidly dynamic web applications using PHP and Groovy running on an optimized java virtual machine. This is the commercial result of the work done at projectzero.org.

On the Rational side, the intention is to provide a native implementation in the new Jazz platform of products like ClearQuest and BuildForge. The next version of the Team Concert product will be improved in terms of enterprise reporting and global project management. The product is still developed using the open commercial concept, where the software is proprietary but the development process is open for customers’ input. As far as Telelogic products are concerned, they will keep their independence and industrial software focus, but they should also get more integrated on the Jazz platform in the longer term. Rational is also introducing a new consulting concept: Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF). The goal of this approach is to check how software development practices are aligned on business objectives.

With the current economic conditions, it could not be easy to sell software development solutions that require large budgets and important modifications of current practices. IBM addresses this challenge by proposing a modular approach that allows a gradual transfer to its Jazz platform and the use of open source solutions in the overall software development toolbox.

Team Concert Beta 3 Out

The Editor — Tue, 13 May 2008 08:10:09 +0000

The IBM’s Jazz project has just released the beta number 3 of its Rational Team Concert (also named Rational Team Concert 1.0 RC2), the first product based on the Jazz Team Server. I had the chance to attend recently in Geneva to an interesting presentation given by John Kellerman, the product manager of Jazz. A long time IBM employee, John worked already on the AD/Cycle project and has been a part of Eclipse since its origins in 1998. He gave an insightful speech on how a company can “develop commercial software in an open transparent way”. This means that the development schedule and progress is completely visible and that open interfaces will allow other companies to integrate their products on the Jazz platform, even if some, like source management systems, are competitors of Rational products. For John, the gain achieved by having an open relationship with customers far outweighs the loss of having some code and development schedule visible by the competition. He said also that having Rational executives agree on this was not an easy task.

The final release of Team Concert should be somewhere in June. Doing it on time for the Rational Software Development Conference would have been a good thing, but apparently this result will be difficult to achieve, even if the product has been beta tested since June 2007. Between 6 to 12 partners are working with IBM to have their products integrated with Team Concert, even if the current API are not yet finalized. A next goal will be to provide integration with Microsoft’s Visual Studio. Even if the product is open, integration could not be an easy task when some access rights have two be synchronized between the Jazz server and the external product for instance.

The origin of the project was the need to have a common infrastructure for the many products (ClearCase, ClearQuest, and etc..) grouped under the Rational banner. If Eclipse could be considered a desktop integration platform, Jazz has the ambition to provide development process integration at the server level. Distributed teams will be able to set a clear software process with related projects roles and share easily artifacts like piece of code, defects or build results. It will also provide managers (IT or business) some good dashboards to follow the project progression.

From what I have seen from a demo that shows Rational Team Concert features accessed through an Eclipse client, the product targets more medium to large teams (even if currently there is a limitation of 250 users by server) that operate in a geographically distributed environments. Some “template” processes will be available with the tool for approaches like OpenUP or Scrum. Even if the product tries to get an “agile” label, the way it enforces structure and project reporting seems to make it more suited for projects that need (or want) strong auditing features. John told us that the tool was liked by both IBM developers and auditors. I don’t think that such a convergence of likeness could be achieved in many places…

It was funny to see that the “we are agile” marketing slide comes just after a slide mentioning that one of the goal of the tool is to reduce status meetings. I thought daily meetings were one of the main concepts behind Scrum ;o) It is however also true that geographically distributed teams face different challenges.

From the Editor of Methods & Tools » Jazz

IBM Rational and WebSphere Strategies

Team Concert Beta 3 Out