 | Level: Introductory Scott Laningham (scottla@us.ibm.com), Podcast Editor, IBM developerWorks
05 Dec 2006 The following is a transcript of a podcast interview between developerWorks podcast editor Scott Laningham and IBM® Rational® execs Jamie Thomas, Lee Nackman, and Scott Hebner.
developerWorks: You're listening to developerWorks interviews where we feature conversations with technical luminaries and thought leaders from a variety of disciplines on topics of interest to technology professionals. I'm your host, Scott Laningham. Our guests today are here to talk about the release of Version 7 of the desktop tools of the Rational Software Delivery Platform: a comprehensive set of Eclipse-based offerings and best practices processes. Our guests from IBM Rational are Jamie Thomas, vice president, Rational Software Development; Lee Nackman, vice president, Product Development and Customer Support; and Scott Hebner, vice president, Marketing and Strategy. Thank you all for making time for this today. We appreciate it.
Thomas: Thanks, Scott. I'm glad to be here.
Nackman: Oh, it's great to be talking with you again, Scott.
Hebner: Yes, I couldn't agree more. Looking forward to it.
developerWorks: Scott Hebner, maybe you could kick us off here with a high-level sense of what is big and new with this release.
Hebner: Well, this is actually a very important announcement as it completes the delivery of Version 7 of the Software Delivery Platform. Earlier in the year, we had announced the team-based part of the portfolio; now this is the desktop. And really, what the theme of the announcement's all about and the new capabilities is empowering the architecture -- particularly in the delivery of software, services and systems -- in a more modular environment such as SOA. In essence, the new capabilities are going to help customers leverage a sound architectural design to more successfully deliver services faster -- particularly with architectural integrity -- in a more geographically diverse or decentralized environment that tends to come with SOA. So if you kind of look at it in total and you look at all the new capabilities, in essence, we're empowering global teams to better implement and manage software and systems architectures with improved life-cycle quality.
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Guest: Scott Hebner
Scott Hebner is responsible for leading the development and execution of Rational Software’s worldwide business strategy, offering management, and marketing activities. He also manages the organization’s business partner and channel marketing, and serves on IBM’s Software Group marketing leadership board, which sets direction for the group’s marketing strategy and programs. Previously, he has served as vice president of ISV and Developer Relations, director of e-business marketing, and director of WebSphere® infrastructure software. He has also managed IBM’s development tools marketing programs and IBM's object technology market development group. You can contact him at hebner@us.ibm.com.
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Four key things to look for in the new capabilities. One, it will speed SOA results due to the sound architectural design and the automation of service delivery and maintenance. Two, it's going to ensure global architectural integrity and the software quality that gets delivered within, particularly and including support for ... new support for testing within packaged applications such as SAP, Oracle, and Siebel. Important also is the new, simpler, modular systems development approach that we're taking, particularly important for those customers that are building systems and software that is highly coupled, such as maybe in aerospace and defense, where you're building the navigation system for a missile system, or building for a cell phone or analog breaks, and it brings new hardware and software modeling and standards support to that effort. And then finally, you'll see a great deal of enhancements in terms of consumability by not only leveraging the latest and greatest of the Eclipse community innovation in standards, Eclipse 3.2, but also some IBM innovation that will allow our customers in a more modular way to kind of build out the environment that they need at the desktop through a much greater degree of modularity, again, all based into the Eclipse platform.
And so when it's all said and done, it's empowering the "A" in SOA, and we're hoping that this is going to help our customers scale their business of global architecture, design, and quality.
developerWorks: That's great -- very comprehensive. Thank you. And I hear you using that term "delivery," in there -- "delivery platform." I've always heard "development platform" before. Is this a newer term, or is this just a different thing that I've not been paying attention to before?
Hebner: Well, we've been playing on the word delivery because the value of what we can deliver and help our customers with is evolving. And when you think about the people that we are providing products and services to, it's those that are responsible for delivering software to the business. And delivering software is not only developing new software but it could be leveraging existing Web services, it could be building and extending and integrating within packaged applications. So when you think about the capabilities being delivered, it's going to help customers more effectively deliver software against their strategic business imperatives.
And again, the notion of delivery is the end goal that you're trying to do here. And you may develop it, you may outsource it, you may be customizing services, you may be building and integrating within a packaged application scenario. So we wanted to ensure that it's not just about software development of new custom applications but the broader notion of how to more effectively deliver software.
developerWorks: I see -- so a refinement of terms -- just more clarity about what is being delivered here, what's being offered in the platform then.
Hebner: Exactly. But it's still as comprehensive as ever, if not more in terms of software development. But again, there's things in there you can do that are broader than just developing new code.
developerWorks: Lee, can I ask you, how does this complement the Baltic announcement of the team products that was made back in June?
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Guest: Lee Nackman
Lee Nackman is responsible worldwide for IBM Rational's product strategy, product development, and customer support. Previously, he was Rational's CTO. He initiated the Eclipse open source tool platform and IBM® WebSphere Studio tool products. He was a founding member of the Board of Stewards for eclipse.org. Prior to joining IBM Software Group in 1998, he held technical and management positions at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 1998. He has published 50 papers, a book, and holds two patents. You can contact him at lrn@us.ibm.com.
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Nackman: It really completes that announcement. Let's just talk about this notion of delivery that you and Scott have just been talking about. In the Baltic announcement, we announced capability for coordinating the overall software life cycle. So this is not just about developing the code but it's also about how do you do the models for architecture, how do you do the requirements gathering, how do you connect requirements with test cases and test results, how do you connect it with builds. And even, how do you take good builds that have passed tests and push those out and deploy them? So it's all about the delivery piece.
Well, what Caspian does is it really adds to that capability. So, as Scott mentioned, it adds new capability for modeling and better capability for modeling of services. It enhances our test capabilities so we can support testing of packaged applications for SAP and for Siebel in ways that we couldn't do back in the Baltic timeframe. It makes it possible to deploy our tools more easily to larger teams than you could do before. Scott mentioned the whole idea of improved consumability. One of the big things that we've been hearing from our customers is they want more flexibility in the ways the tools actually get deployed to the, I'll call them the practitioners rather than the developers, because there's a lot of different kinds of people using these tools. So we've made big steps forward in the ability to do that kind of deployment. So I really view Caspian as part of a one two punch with Baltic.
developerWorks: And Caspian is the internal term for Version 7 that we're talking about here, right?
Nackman: Right, just in the same way that Baltic was the internal name for Version 7 of the Team products.
developerWorks: Right, OK. Well, you talked a little bit about this here just now, but what are other evolutionary changes in IT and in business that have really been the impetus for these new releases?
Nackman: You know, customers are trying very hard to improve their ability to deliver business value. So our customers who are in IT are trying to be more responsive to the changes in business models that customers have, and that means that the IT organizations have to be able to have a good control of the overall life cycle. So when a requirement changes, or a new requirement comes in, how do they manage implementation of that requirement? How do they manage testing of the implementation of that requirement? How do they manage prioritization? All of those sorts of things. And so what we're doing in the software development platform really brings together that whole broad set of capability to meet that kind of challenge.
Now, the other thing is, this is not just about IT; it's also about systems development. So we're hearing very similar kinds of directions from our systems customers where they're not only concerned about developing code but how does their software fit together with the hardware to make a whole system that they're developing? So this is an area where it's really important that they have ways of modeling the architecture, they have ways of understanding how the software interacts with the larger system that they're part of and those kinds of things. So we're seeing this push across the industry both in IT and in systems for more responsiveness and faster ability to do integration of software with other parts of what they're doing.
The other thing that I would point out is that we're seeing in many customers, in both IT and in systems, a need to be able to document and be ready for auditability that they really can track the whole life cycle of this software. So for compliance purposes with various regulations, how do they know exactly what software they deployed? And when they deploy new software, what requirements or what defects are fixed, and how do they document that? Who approved the deployment of this new code, and how is that documented? That's all part of how these two pieces, Caspian and Baltic, fit together because Baltic really provided a lot of the infrastructure for doing that, and Caspian provides the practitioner tools that fit into that infrastructure.
developerWorks: And I think that's a good lead in for Jamie to get in on this discussion a bit. Jamie, could you talk in a little more detail about some of the things that have been mentioned so far, service-oriented architecture, tracking, testing, some of that stuff? Maybe give us some detail on the day to day impact of this for developers?
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Guest: Jamie Thomas
Jamie Thomas is vice president of Rational Software Development in Raleigh, N.C. She provides direction for development across the Rational portfolio. Prior to her current role, she was vice president of WebSphere Server Development, providing direction for the development of WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere XD, and Java™ technology teams. She also acted as director of WebSphere Strategy and Communications in the Application Integration Middleware Software organization for IBM. Throughout her career, she has managed product development and planning across multiple software divisions, including various products in the application development family and components of the System z platform. You can contact her at tjamie@us.ibm.com.
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Thomas: Well, Scott -- clearly, a key component of what we want to address for developers and their ability to better develop in this world of SOA architectures, right? So we focus on a couple of key dimensions. One is primarily around the management of architectural changes across the life cycle, and another of course is managing this issue of quality across the life cycle. Some of the key elements, we think developers really want to be able to achieve as part of their development process is ensure that they can trace artifacts throughout the life cycle all the way from the requirements phase throughout the modeling phase to production of code and understand of course systematically how that code gets tested and deployed in a production environment. And so when we talk about the end-to-end life cycle we're really talking about this whole management of these assets across the spectrum.
Providing some key capabilities, things like providing the ability to have traceable steps, which is of course a key element in being able to comply with many standards that exist across industries today, which is a key element of governance, which of course goes hand in hand with SOA architectures, typically. Being able to better utilize some of our new capabilities that we've brought into Rational around BuildForge to truly achieve this end-to-end life-cycle deployment aspect, being able to automate the back-end deployment of artifacts into the various production environments, and also being able to really understand customer environments more fully, being able to have repeatable results in those environments and understand production patterns, and being able to replicate those appropriately utilizing the Rational tool set.
Another key element I think that's key for the developers here is just this whole focus on productivity. Our continued focus on standards including Eclipse-based standards, UML standards, Web services standards, and of course the continuation of our strong support for Java standards, are all a key element of the product line that we've announced here with the Caspian update. Some significant changes that I think will increase developer productivity not only from the standards perspective but also in terms of how the products actually get installed and get reflected on the individual desktops. So some key requirements that developers have been asking us for, for quite some time.
developerWorks: So you mentioned some enhanced testing features and products with this release. Tell us a bit more about that, if you would.
Thomas: Yes. We believe in terms of quality management of course the testing and automation of testing is absolutely critical for a lot of companies to really achieve what I've referred to as repeatable results and being able to better predict what's going to occur in the production environment.
We have a couple of products that we've enhanced, the Rational Performance Tester, the Rational Function Tester. In the case of the Performance Tester, we've integrated that with a lot of the Tivoli® product line to ensure that we can basically share information between Rational and Tivoli with Tivoli being predominately focused on the deployment environment. And by being able to share that information that Tivoli basically ascertains to the monitoring time, they can then input that information back into the Performance Tester and be able to drill down a particular performance bottleneck and areas where perhaps we know that there is a problem that we need to analyze and of course fix from an application development perspective.
This whole area of end-to-end life-cycle management including the monitoring aspect, being able to more fully diagnose problems and remediate those problems quickly is a key problem for today's architectures and, of course, SOAs as well. And we think that these enhancements to the testing portfolio will greatly enable customers to solve some of these problems in a much more effective manner.
developerWorks: All a part of this overarching message about governance that you were talking about, isn't it?
Thomas: Exactly. So you know, my thought is we're really looking at a cycle of course that starts with requirements definition, early modeling from a business and architectural modeling perspective, co-production, all the way through building the assets, being able to then understand what was built, test those assets of course, understand how they're performing in a production environment. And so our ability here to integrate between the Rational and Tivoli portfolio is quite critical in achieving that end goal.
developerWorks: Thank you for all of that, Jamie. And, we won't keep you because we know you've got to get on to something else, but we appreciate you taking a few moments to join us for this today.
Thomas: Thanks, Scott, and I look forward to talking to you and this audience in the future.
developerWorks: Absolutely. Again, that was Jamie Thomas, vice president, Rational Software Development.
Now, Scott Hebner, if we could come back to you for a second. I'm wondering after what Jamie said and some of the other things that have been said, if you could give us a little more about how this release enhances and strengthens this drive towards service-oriented architecture.
Hebner: Well, SOA is all about modular software and the ability to create business flexibility by being able to deliver, maintain, integrate, and build new software in a more modular approach. And what we're finding with our customers is that it is very much driving a change in how they do solutions development and delivery, and in many ways, there's some practical realities that become even more important for our customers to focus on ... such as, you know, it becomes critically important that you're linking to the business architecture and the business process models that have been put in place the actual IT architecture and the service models underneath that so that you can automate the delivery of services that fulfill the business process model, keep them in sync, be able to reconcile them, particularly when you get into broad-based use of services.
In addition to that, there's the need to address and control risks that are inherent in a globally distributed environment. Customers begin to manage more and more services, very large numbers of services, and you need to ensure their architectural of how those services work with each other, and make sure that you can reconcile them, the actual code and the applications with the designs. And of course at the same time, while the notion of SOA kind of drives a greater degree of control and governance that's needed to make the overall organization effective, we also need to make sure that we're enabling flexibility for the developer and managing their ability to build out a custom desktop particularly with more and more open source elements being introduced.
So then, when it's all said and done, decentralization and the modularity that SOA brings is really driving a much greater need for a structured approach to architecture, modeling and life-cycle quality management. And that's what the new capabilities in this release help provide developers and the overall customers that are involved in SOA projects.
developerWorks: What about business partner support for this? What are you all seeing on that?
Hebner: Well, as I mentioned earlier on, one of the key parts of the new value that's coming in these products in Version 7 is a much greater degree of modularity in the ability to consume different elements of functionality and kind of configure them to the needs that a developer would have. And part of that is allowing and enabling business partners to build extensions into the platform. We have this whole Ready for Rational program, and we have a whole bunch of new partners who have already enabled new capabilities within the Version 7 desktop products, such as Black Duck for open source software reuse, Clockwork, the systems delivery and embedded development extensions, Exaltech software for helping to modernize existing applications within an SOA environment.
So the business partner has become increasingly important as we move through time here because they're going to help provide some of the added value and capabilities that our customers are going to need in their desktop products and provide the broader set of consulting -- services that are going to help them be successful not only in SOA but any kind of development such as systems development.
developerWorks: Well, this is great. You guys have given us a good sense of why this is an important series of releases and what it represents for everyone involved. Any closing thoughts? Anything we didn't cover here you wanted to share?
Nackman: I'd just like to mention a couple of other things that I think are important about this release. Scott already mentioned that this release is based on Eclipse 3.2. Another thing that we've been hearing from a number of our customers is that, you know, "We already use Eclipse in our shop, and we'd like your tools to just install as plug-ins on top of the Eclipse that we've already deployed." That's another consumability feature that is in Caspian. So we've really put a lot of effort into making sure that the Caspian release products play very well with existing Eclipse deployments, existing Java Virtual Machine deployments. So that's another important theme in this release.
One more thing I'd like to mention is the support for the latest version of the WebSphere Application Server. That's a big step ahead for the Rational Application Developer, Rational Software Architect product in this release.
Hebner: And I'd just add to that, too. It's actually the fifth anniversary of Eclipse. There are over 150 member companies now, over 2.4 million users around the world. It's the basis of nearly 1,300 products. So you know, five years, man -- time really flies. But it just seems to be really on a roll, it's hit a nerve, and the community is continuing to grow. It has real tangible effects on the overall software industry. So this is a timely announcement, as Lee just mentioned, our support for Eclipse, and how we're hoping to really leverage it to provide the consumability and the support for business partners and the ability to adapt our products. But again, playing in the larger, broader community that's out there. And it's an important milestone. Five years, and you know, it will be 10 years before we know it.
Nackman: Yes, absolutely. Another piece of this announcement is the service offering for Eclipse, because again, we're seeing a number of customers who are using Eclipse in their organizations and would like to have support from IBM for their use of Eclipse. And that's a new capability that we're introducing in this release.
Hebner: I guess, Scott, the last thing we should probably wrap up on here is what products are we actually talking about here? We referenced the desktop products as part of the Software Delivery Platform Version 7. But just to be explicit, we're talking about Rational Software Architect, Rational Software Modeler, Rational System Developer, and Rational Application Developer, which are the integrated development environments, and of course, our suite of testing and quality management products such as Rational Performance Tester and Functional Tester and Manual Tester. And, of course, there's some suites and bundles that come along with all of that. But when we talk about the desktop products, that's essentially the configurations that we're talking about there.
developerWorks: And as you said, with the Eclipse part of it it really represents another important point along the road of what is a very neat success story, doesn't it?
Hebner: Yes, it certainly does. And you know, without the community out there, without the thriving innovation that's occurring out there, the value that's adding to our customers is quite significant, and, therefore, we're going to continue to invest and expand on that as we move through time, no doubt.
developerWorks: Lee Nackman, Scott Hebner, thanks again to you both for doing this. Always good to talk to you guys.
Nackman: Thank you, Scott.
Hebner: Thank you.
developerWorks: Again, our guests today were Jamie Thomas, vice president, Rational Software Development; Lee Nackman, vice president of Product Development and Customer Support; and Scott Hebner, vice president of Marketing and Strategy. For everyone at developerWorks, I'm Scott Laningham. Talk to you next time.
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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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