developerWorks: You're listening to a developerWorks Interviews podcast. I'm Scott Laningham, developerWorks podcast editor, and we're IBM's technical resource for developers, with tools, code, and education on IBM® products and open standards technology.

September 25 marks the 10th anniversary of alphaWorks, IBM's program offering early-adopter developers around the world a way to experience the latest innovations from IBM and to contribute in a development dialogue. Since 1996, alphaWorks has helped IBM connect with innovative developers , and the result to date: 40 percent of technologies posted to the alphaWorks Web site have been incorporated into IBM products or licensed to third-party developers. Today, over 200 technologies are available for download. alphaWorks business model has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Harvard Business Review. alphaWorks received the 2003 "Jolt!" award from the Software Developers Journal for best developer Web site.

We have an esteemed panel on the podcast today to reflect on the past 10 years and consider what may lie ahead. Irving Wladawsky-Berger is vice president, Technical Strategy and Innovation for IBM. Rod Smith is an IBM Fellow and vice president, Emerging Internet Technologies, IBM Software Group . And Gina Poole is vice president, Innovation and University Relations for IBM. Thank you all for coming on today to talk about alphaWorks.

Wladawsky-Berger: Nice to be here.
Smith: Very nice to be here.
Poole: Great -- good morning.

developerWorks: Now, I'd like to start by asking each of you if you might share how you've been involved with alphaWorks just a little bit for this audience. And I don't know what order you'd like to go in.

Wladawsky-Berger: Let me start. This is Irving Wladawsky, because I probably have been involved the longest. Sometime around '96, '97, when we were starting our Internet efforts in IBM, we were a little bit frustrated that with the Internet, there was a new class of applications possible that were a lot less industrial-strength, more user-friendly using Web front ends -- browsers and things like that -- but because our development cycles were all geared to back-end commercial applications, everything was taking too long.

And so we said, "We need something else so that we can get the ideas of our great people in our research and development labs out there much faster." And that's when the idea for alphaWorks came in -- that why don't we take certain kinds of Internet applications, put them on this new Web site called alphaWorks, and then let people both within IBM and outside IBM start experimenting with them. And Rod, I suspect you then took it from there, and you were quite involved from the beginning, right?

Smith: And it's a very good setup, that yes, we looked at that as an opportunity, as a valve for creativity for a lot of our folks, and we used it not only to get ideas out there and collaborate with customers early on on technology but also it kind of shaped our culture going forward into how we participated in Web projects, how we participated in open source, and how our folks thought about an iteration process on technologies as opposed to our normal product offerings.

Wladawsky-Berger: And Gina -- you really then built it up into something that became almost a major part of our development in IBM, right?

Poole: That's right. I had the unique opportunity to be part of the alphaWorks mission for over eight years, and as we began to really focus on our overall developers strategy and how we interacted with the 10 million developers externally and then brought them in and got them engaged in these new technologies. One of the powerful things about alphaWorks is really kind of behind our whole strategy of innovation today is bringing in the community and collaborating with the external community, collaborating with the global community and getting their feedback on these technologies.

And that was kind of at the core of the alphaWorks strategy from day one, is to get that external feedback, to get these technologies into the hands of early adopters and developers around the world, and to really shape those technologies with that external feedback. And I think we've been very successful in that respect. We've had probably thousands of technologies out there with millions of downloads, millions of users, giving us feedback on those technologies. And you know, hundreds of those technologies have become products or made their way into products that I think were much more successful based on that external community interaction.

Wladawsky-Berger: Actually, Gina, as you're talking, something is coming through my mind. People more and more talk about a key difference between Web 2.0 and the original Web, is that Web 2.0 is far more collaborative in nature. So it may be that with alphaWorks, we were actually ahead of the game with collaboration. We didn't call it that perhaps, we didn't call it, we didn't know about Web 2.0. But Rod, I know you've been really thinking hard about this and maybe alphaWorks is one of the original Web 2.0 major applications.

Smith: Well, I think that if you look especially how we're thinking about mashups today, the bar has been raised significantly as we think about this moving towards more domain experts. But Web 2.0, if you look at alphaWorks, it really started from the idea of putting technology together, putting it on alphaWorks, hosting it on alphaWorks, having people use it, come back and collaborate with us on it, tell us what they liked and didn't like about it.

And, as Gina says, that was feedback that goes in our products, that's feedback that goes in open standards, that was immensely valuable information that we could utilize in lots of places. So, again, I think as Web 2.0 comes along that cultural shift that businesses are going through on how to use and think about their assets -- people assets, data assets, you know, other things in Web 2.0 context -- we've been, you know, we've been on the forefront of that especially as we do alphaWorks and we do our sharing and demonstrate to people our willingness to collaborate.

developerWorks: Can I ask you all: It sounds like you're kind of skating along the edge of this anyway, but how does the alphaWorks effort dovetail with the broader open source initiative?

Smith: Well, for my work, in particular early days of XML, for example, we put up the original parser work, the Xalon and Xerses work that went into Apache. And interesting at the time because it paralleled to the standards efforts that were going on for W3C. And we learned how many people were interested in utilizing that technology. A change would come through the W3C archives were committed to making the change and getting it up, back up on alphaWorks in 24 hours, and we would immediately see 10,000 download spikes come up where people would be downloading the new code. So from our standpoint, that was very interesting, insightful. And then, you know, we looked at it in the broader context of open standards, and this is a technology we felt was going to be broadly adopted in the industry.

And you know, the movement towards opening this up from when the standard finished and putting it into Apache from a Xerses and Xalon standpoint. So it's, again, it's been very influential for us and helpful for us to gauge the adoption of technology. And if the technology should, as Gina talked about, roll into products, is this something that really can be leveraged in lots of places that we should open source and also be able to leverage in our products.

Wladawsky-Berger: You know, it's interesting: When we had our big push on Linux® in 2000, quite a few IT analysts and customers and others were shocked that IBM would embrace the open source movement and Linux, in particular, as aggressively as we did. And they asked us why are we doing it -- where do you make money? And I think Rod mentioned this before, because of alphaWorks, because of the work with Apache years earlier, our culture had totally switched. So we were very comfortable by the time we embraced Linux aggressively in 2000 that the way to make progress in lots of areas is to aggressively collaborate with communities. And we were equally comfortable having seen the lesson with Apache and WebSphere® that we can collaborate and make money at the same time. So that may have been a hang up for lots of other businesses, but I think we were totally comfortable with that. Do you agree, Gina?

Poole: Oh, absolutely. I think over the years, alphaWorks became a very powerful channel both for IBM support of open standards, as Rod said, but also as a channel for projects that we ultimately contributed to the open source community. A lot of projects may have debuted on alphaWorks and, based on the community enthusiasm for these projects, and where they wanted to take them, that helped us to make the decision to contribute them to the open source community.

developerWorks: Gina, why do you think developers are so interested in accessing alpha technologies? What's up with that?

Poole: I think the most exciting thing about the alphaWorks technology is that they're emerging technologies. It gives them a very early glimpse into some of the hot things going on, definitely in the IBM research and development labs, but really does mirror the hot things going on in the industry. And so they can start using these new technologies and kind of a side benefit that, perhaps, we hadn't thought about so much when we started alphaWorks. but that has clearly become an important element of it, is the influence alphaWorks has on developer skills. It helps developers get a leg up, get going with some of the hot new technologies so that they can be kind of the first to have these new skills.

And some of my favorite technologies on alphaWorks are actually skills focused to help even university students kind of build skills and new technologies. So we had a number of programming games on alphaWorks -- such as Robocode, CodeRuler, CodeWarrior -- to help developers learn these new skills. And some of those technologies have gone on to the open source community and been very, very popular and very helpful to help developers build those hot new skills.

developerWorks: Well, what about other memorable moments over the past 10 years that you all have participated in or observed? Some favorite moments to share?

Wladawsky-Berger: You know, when we first started alphaWorks in '96, '97, that's before we "drank the KoolAid" and our culture had switched, people were very worried, legally, what do we do about this. You know, the thought had been that anytime you create a piece of software, you needed three lawyers guarding it and do nothing with it.

But as our culture started to change, the Internet was taking off, we saw browsers, for example, Netscape browsers, be given away for free as a business model, that even our lawyers started to look at the world quite a bit differently, and they worked very closely with our teams to help us understand what was OK to put out, what language do you put out, what kinds of things you can do and cannot do. And we make terrific progress that helped us immensely as we embrace open source more and more over the years.

Smith: I think from my standpoint, one of the big turning points for us was when we started the Web services push -- very different programming model, not the tightly coupled CORBA models of the past, and very standards-based. And two things that were, you know, really early and unproven although had lots of promise, in putting the first Web services toolkit up and seeing the reaction, seeing the customers coming in, having people get it and get it in the not just download sense but understand it, embrace open standards at that point from an integration standpoint, I think were major factors in helping IBM and the industry move down the service-oriented architecture path. Without having alphaWorks there, I don't think we'd have got the start or the adoption.

developerWorks: Well, maybe we should wrap up with this question, because I know you all are on a short timetable here. But I wonder if you care to share any thoughts at all about where in the near term you see alphaWorks headed and or where you'd like to see it headed.

Wladawsky-Berger: Well, you know, cooperative development integration is more important than ever. If you are a developer, it's absolutely critical that whatever you build fits in with what everybody else is building. And the only way to do that is if you have access as early as possible to the standards, open technologies, open source software, that will facilitate integration. So I think that the role of alphaWorks and related open development environment is going to be even more important as we look into the future.

Smith: From my standpoint, I think alphaWorks and the alphaWorks Services is going to be an important factor as we're seeing software as a service models come up -- how you do the hosting types of things, how you do these applications that are, you know, have instant value that you can use. And this will be yet again another class of application that our customers are going to want to experiment with. And you know, I think alphaWorks is going to be the place for us that we will learn, we will be able to evolve our solutions and look at more standards, emerging standards, and in the industry.

Poole: And I think both Irving and Rod said it well: The focus will be on increasing the collaborative nature of alphaWorks and looking at new classes of applications such as what we'll be finding on alphaWorks Services. But I think there's some real exciting things in store.

developerWorks: Well, thank you all so much for taking the time to do this today. It's been great fun.

Smith: Thank you.
Wladawsky-Berger:Thank you.
Poole: Thank you. Bye-bye.

developerWorks: Our guests have been Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president, Technical Strategy and Innovation for IBM; Rod Smith, an IBM Fellow and vice president of Emerging Internet Technologies, IBM Software Group; and Gina Poole, vice president of Innovation and University Relations for IBM. For everyone at developerWorks, I'm Scott Laningham. Talk to you next time.

Resources

• alphaWorks
  
  
• alphaWorks next-generation launch and 10th anniversary
  
  
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger's blog
  
  
• IBM Research
  
  
• developerWorks' Emerging Technologies You Need to Know blog
  
  
• alphaWorks' Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK) portal
  
  
• ETTK (Emerging Technologies Toolkit) Community
  
  
• developerWorks podcasts
  
  

About the author

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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