developerWorks: I'm Scott Laningham, and this is a developerWorks podcast. My guests this time are three individuals in the IBM Rational organization — three key individuals. Grady Booch is an IBM Fellow. Welcome back to the podcast, Grady.
Booch: Thank you very much.
developerWorks: Lee Nackman is with us, and he's familiar to this audience. Lee's responsible worldwide for IBM Rational product development and customer support. Good to have you back, Lee.
Nackman: It's great to be here, Scott.
developerWorks: And we also have Walker Royce, vice president of Rational Services. Good to have you joining us, Walker.
Royce: Hi, Scott, Nice to join.
developerWorks: Finally, I said three, but there's four. Also joining in our discussion is Michael O'Connell, editor in chief of developerWorks. Hi, Michael.
O'Connell: Hi, Scott. Glad to join.
developerWorks: Now, the occasion for this podcast is the five-year anniversary of the acquisition of Rational by IBM. And I know you all have a great perspective, each of you individually, to share on what this has meant to both IBM and Rational, and the software community at large. And that's the first thing I would love to hear you all talk about. Maybe, what has been the biggest benefit to the software community at large resulting from Rational and IBM coming together? Grady, do you want to start off on that?
Booch: Well, if you mean the software community at large beyond just IBM and really the whole software industry, I think a couple of things come to mind. Being part of IBM, Rational has really had a new focus for us. I mean, prior to that time, we really were somewhat a little split between our support for Microsoft® and non-Microsoft platforms, and moving into the IBM fold really gave us a point where, from a business perspective and a technical perspective, we could put all of our weight behind just one arrow. And that was really towards the Eclipse and more open source movement. And I think that focus really was good energy for us and for the community at large.
Additionally, there's a fascinating synergy between Rational's expertise in the non-enterprise market and IBM's expertise in the enterprise market. The sum of the whole was bigger than the individual parts. And I think that raises the tide for the whole community.
developerWorks: Lee or Walker, do you want to chime in on that?
Nackman: Sure. This is Lee. I think one of the other benefits to the community at large is that IBM enables some of the ideas and some of the technologies that Rational had to have impact with a broader reach than Rational was able to do as a stand-alone company. So I think we've been able to bring some of the capabilities that Rational has to help organizations do a better job of developing software to a wider range of clients than has happened before.
Royce: I would echo that. I think in the past, at least from our software perspective, IBM was probably more focused in the IT side of the world, and Rational more focused on the product developers, telecom, industrial, aerospace and automotive segments. And for me, actually, I think the biggest thing we're bringing to the community is just coming out now, which is sort of an overhauled collaborative software development platform — namely, Jazz — that was only enabled because we could combine IBM's research investment, IBM's product development might, and Rational's know-how and best practices into a new platform for the whole community.
developerWorks: You know, it makes me wonder hearing you say that, Walker, do you think that Rational had a key part to play in IBM being known more as a software company than it was before Rational coming on board?
Royce: I think it has. I was probably skeptical when we first joined, but now after five years, I can see three things that I think we've really impacted.
I think we've solidified IBM's middleware strength by broadening their offering into the development world and deepening the impact by integrating runtime middleware components, services, and knowledge with development-time models, processes, and assets.
The second thing is that the global services units have become one of our premier customers. That's new. And they're now employing thousands of licenses across their services lines of business within IBM.
And the third thing is I think the Rational field culture of sort of accelerating customer results has become one of the centerpieces of a high-visibility corporate activity called the Client Value Initiative. You'll hear more about that this year. But I think you'll see a lot of Rational's core field culture in that.
Nackman: I think that Rational has also changed our view of application development in the IBM Software Group. I was part of IBM before the acquisition, and before the acquisition of Rational, most of our application development tools effort was focused on "How do we enable developers to make the best use of our middleware?"
And I think after the Rational acquisition, we've taken a much broader focus on "How do we help our clients be more successful in developing software?" And so that goes far beyond just how do they write applications on our middleware? It goes to how do we help them organize? How do we help them choose the best processes? How do we help them put in place good practices across the whole software life cycle? So it's a much broader view of how we help the clients to be more successful in software development than we had before Rational.
Booch: And look, for example, the connections we found with our product line and Tivoli's product line, so we aren't just about development, but we're also about sustainability, as well and providing tools that help for the ongoing evolution of existing systems.
Royce: Yes — and I think those are both great points that really point the way to the future, which is, there won't be a distinct demarcation between sort of development time and runtime. We are moving to continuously evolving systems where the runtime middleware and development-time middleware need to work together for something that lasts a very long time and is not first in the development phase, then an operations phase. It turns out it's all merging into a continuous development and operational setting.
Booch: There's a phrase emerging called Brownfield development. Greenfield development, you have no legacy to worry about. But most economically interesting software these days is not Greenfield but it's Brownfield, meaning that you're continuing to evolve a system that you can't turn off any more.
O'Connell: Grady, this is Michael. I wanted to follow up on your earlier comment about how the acquisition affected Rational's focus to split to more focused on hope-development practices, open standards, and things like Eclipse. I was hoping you could elaborate a little bit on how did that benefit Rational?
Booch: Well, Rational was a great believer in open source software. We were one of the original members of the Eclipse organization prior to our acquisition. And so, we're great believers in that. But from a very pragmatic viewpoint, we were investing in both tools for the Microsoft platform and tools for the non-Microsoft platform. And that was to some degree a diffusion of our energies. Having now become part of IBM, it made tremendous economic sense for us to put all of our weight behind the open source platforms, and that freed up resources and freed up focus for us. So it was an opportunity cost that the decision we made once being part of IBM just really pruned a lot of our effort and allowed us to focus. Not to say we don't care about the Microsoft platform by any means. It's just that we've realized the problem is no longer that of optimizing the productivity of the individual developer, but it's optimizing the activity of the team. And that's a problem that transcends platform, and that's a problem that really does fit well to the open source world of standards.
O'Connell: I guess that's what efforts like Jazz effort and Rational Team Concert Express address.
Booch: Absolutely.
Royce: Yes, I totally agree with that. I can remember numerous internal debates in the late '90s regarding our inability to get to the real integration we wanted without owning an IDE, more or less. And there were some pretty heavy debates. And I think as Grady just described, investing in two lines of that business did not allow us to put enough wood behind the arrow to come up with the integrated platform we really need. So I think now, especially with IBM's commitment towards Eclipse and Jazz.net and those sorts of things, we have one common IDE, if you will, that we can integrate into that allows us exactly what we need in the breadth and depth across the platform.
developerWorks: You know, we've talked about Rational's impact on IBM, and here you've been talking a bit about how the support of IBM has contributed to Rational's evolution over the past five years. Is there more in that part of the discussion that you all would like to share? Maybe how the portfolio has been impacted by the acquisition over the years.
Booch: Beyond the portfolio, I'd like to offer an observation that's more of a meta-issue. And one of the things that just delights me about being part of a larger IBM is there is a structure for development of the technical talents, managerial talents of individuals. And Rational being the size company it was, you know, we invested to some degree in the nurturing of our talent. But we're the size of company that it was an interesting economic trade-off for us. But now being part of the larger IBM, I'm just utterly stunned and delighted by the mechanisms that IBM has in place to continue to grow its technical talent from the communities of practice to the various leadership courses and just the exposure to so many great minds and great experiences. Being part of that has been a refreshing thing for Rational's technical talent.
Royce: I'd like to echo that. There's no doubt in my mind managing a large number of technical people that the number one plus that IBM brought to our teams was real first-class technical career paths, and the opportunities and professional frameworks within IBM are unsurpassed in the industry as far as I can tell. And we see a direct benefit of that — namely, the attrition in our technical people since the acquisition has been very, very low, and that's a huge asset.
Booch: We've seen Rational DNA circulate to lots of interesting places of IBM. We've got folks in Research and IGS and the high-performance computing. So we have spread our DNA far and wide.
Royce: And I think there's other places where Rational has evolved a lot. In fact, our portfolio has been impacted by the merger. I think the No. 1 thing from my point of view is that we've been far more focused in the last five years on the whole rather than the parts. You know, clearly the Eclipse and open stuff are mainstream core strategies for our entire product line. We've shifted our investment profile to develop Jazz, for example, which was architected as a middleware platform, rather than as a distinct tool or a set of tools. And I think that's a big difference. And then we've acquired technologies in companies which allow us to accelerate our strategy in solution areas like globally distributed development and governance and compliance and SOA. So I think that's a big difference from before.
developerWorks: It sounds like everybody is saying in different ways that Rational has really impacted and contributed to a much more holistic approach to software development on the part of IBM. Wouldn't you say that's true?
Booch: Holistic approach? Well, manifest as one example of the unification of the global services method and the RUP work. Here's a case where we've been able to band together the experience of both groups and create something that's better than what the originals were.
Nackman: And I think that having the people talent that we brought in with Rational into IBM as well as a focus, like I said, a changed focus on helping customers with the overall problem of doing better software development — better software delivery — has allowed us to do things like Jazz because it's really increased the breadth of our thinking to trying to solve a broad problem, rather than to solve the narrow problem of application development tools aimed at a particular middleware. So I think that mindset shift has been a very important thing that's happened as a result of the acquisition, and the talent that we brought into the picture has enabled us to take that broader view and do that successfully.
developerWorks: I wonder if we might — I don't want to cut anybody off on this subject here — but I'm wondering if you all might want to share some thoughts about Rational's future, about where you see .... We've talked a bit about Jazz, but with the unfoldment of Jazz and even beyond, what do you all see?
Royce: I'll start. I see two things. One: simply growth. I think we have built a foundation for growth over the last five years that I suspect is ready to take off. I think we have enough pieces in place, and the market is seeing the value and a broader set of skills in our own skills, in our partners in Global Services. So that's the No. 1 thing is growth.
And the second thing that maybe I'm hoping more than I'm just predicting, but I think we'll see a new wave of thought leadership. I think one of the things that we had five or 10 years ago was a very distinct reputation in the industry for thought leaders, and people came to us for that thought leadership. And I think we have more of that at IBM than the market realizes. But we haven't channeled that energy into an identity out there. And I think with where we're going now and with that growth will come a new wave of thought leadership.
developerWorks: How do you go about making people more aware of that?
Nackman: Maybe we have to do more podcasts. [LAUGHTER]
developerWorks: Well, certainly not wait another five years to talk about this subject again, then, right?
Royce: Actually, my hope is it comes more from our customers and the results they produce than from us beating our chests. It probably takes a little of both, but the biggest thing we can do is deliver value into our client base and have them describing why, which hopefully includes some real thought leadership on the part of the folks working on Jazz, the folks in the field who are out there delivering it in its first and second instances, and things like that.
O'Connell: And we're also doing things beyond the customer base of the traditional businesses to encourage leadership within universities, too, with things like the Jazz faculty grants. I think that's another example of how at the same time there's a broader focus, perhaps, as a benefit of IBM and Rational joining forces.
Royce: We probably should see another set of popular books come out. When you have good ideas, it's easy to write books that sell and create an identity of thought leadership. I know we have a lot of publishing going on. IBM supports that sort of publishing in white papers, conferences, books, developerWorks, etc. very well. And I think you're going to see, as things start maturing and there's real patterns of new development successes coming out, that those books will happen and a lot of them will come out of IBM.
One question that didn't get asked is what hasn't changed? And I think that's equally important. And the No. 1 thing that comes to my mind is our overall value proposition really hasn't changed. For the last 20-30 years, we've been out there trying to improve the capability of organizations that depend on software, in simplest terms. And that is still our mainstream mission. Although it's broadened and deepened in many dimensions, the core intent of the brand and the core value proposition stayed the same. And to me, it's a sign, especially in kind of the software world, where technologies are overhauling themselves every five years. We've managed to maintain a long-term persistent mission that people can rally around.
developerWorks: Well, this has been great. And thank you all for doing this. Lee, it was good having you on again, and Walker and Grady and Michael. It was an enjoyable discussion.
Guests: Bye-bye.
developerWorks: My guests again have been Rational's Grady Booch, Lee Nackman, Walker Royce, and developerWorks' Michael O'Connell. Get more information on this topic at ibm.com/developerworks. This has been a developerWorks podcast. I'm Scott Laningham. Thanks for listening.
Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician.
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