Podcast interview with:
Danny Sabbah, General Manager, IBM Rational Software
Scott Laningham, developerWorks podcast editor
Michael O'Connell, developerWorks editor in chief

SCOTT LANINGHAM: I'm Scott Laningham, developerWorks podcast editor and I'm joined by developerWorks editor in
chief Michael O'Connell. 

We're podcasting from the Rational Software Development Conference 2006, which is going on this week in
Orlando, Florida, and we're joined by Danny Sabbah, who is general manager of IBM Rational Software.  Thanks
so much for a few moments of your time today, Danny.

DANNY SABBAH: Thank you.

SCOTT LANINGHAM: Yesterday during the keynote, certainly a big part of the message that I heard when I was
listening was the big things that you said are affecting business that everyone needs to keep their eye on,
and globalization and regulation.  I think you talked about Moore's Law, plus, what did you say, free
unlimited bandwidth? That's kind of a double edged sword.

DANNY SABBAH: Right.

SCOTT LANINGHAM: How do you sense the receptivity to that big message that you're encouraging people to be
aware of and keep track of? 

DANNY SABBAH: I think that a lot of people can associate with the speed of business, right?  And basically
with the pressure that they're under to actually shift business models, that's a lot of what we've been
talking about in the SOA message that we've had.  And I think that that's prior to the SOA message or as part
of the SOA message in our on demand messages. 

So I think that notion of flexibility, agility and speed to market are resonating with every single business
that I can think of that I talked to.  And certainly the feedback that I've gotten in this conference is very
in line with that. 

Now, the thing that has surprised me in this conference is the amount of discussion and the amount of
interaction around how people are starting to face compliance issues, all kinds of compliance issues, in the
context of trying to essentially diversify their business, whether it's going globalization, whether it's
offshoring, whether it's essentially working with business partners to actually compose and deliver new
products.  One of the biggest topics that we seem to have hit in software and systems development is this
notion of ‘how do I automate compliance so that I free up my developers to actually innovate rather than focus
on essentially being, you know, bureaucracy checkers?’ right? 

And that's been one of the bigger themes to start emerging from some of the comments I've made and that others
have made in this particular conference.

SCOTT LANINGHAM: That was certainly part of what they were talking about this morning as well.  Michael, do
you want to jump in? 

MICHAEL O’CONNELL:  I asked you a little bit about that from the developers’ perspective yesterday, Danny, and
I think Roger also addressed the point about automation being a key benefit from the standpoint of developers
being able to as you put it innovate.  And seeing governance not as a hindrance but as an enabler, and
providing freedom to operate without worrying about some of those issues, if it's automated.  I don't know if
you want to reinforce some of those points for the individual developers? 

DANNY SABBAH: Absolutely.  One of the advantages of having a lifecycle platform is that a side effect of what
we do in capturing each and every single one of the artifacts as Lee [Nackman] was talking about this morning,
and the meta data around those particular artifacts is being able to actually start doing automated reporting,
okay.  And traceability and visibility into the overall process. 

So we have customers that are using our platform to, for example, comply with Sarbanes Oxley audits, and
they're no longer having to beat the developers over the head to actually capture the traceability in each and
every single one of the phases of the software development lifecycle.  What they do is they use our platform
to capture information as, you know, the project progresses through the individual elements of the lifecycle
and they use that information to satisfy auditors. 

SCOTT LANINGHAM: Where are we in this transformation? In the sense that we're talking about here, where are we
along the curve of all of this? 

DANNY SABBAH: I think that the time line, you have to think of the time line in terms of balancing between
issues of individual productivity, in other words, what each individual developer can do, which is still
extremely important, and organizational capability, basically, which is how do I mesh the two?  How do I get
an individual to be as productive as they possibly can?  And we've done a lot in the last, 10, 15, 20 years,
with the advent of automation, with the advent of rich development environments around things like Eclipse,
where basically individual developers using, you know, Rational Application Developer or RSA or any of our
products built on Eclipse, can get tremendous amounts of individual productivity.  But then when you start
looking at it from the pressures that businesses are facing today, that's not enough.  You also have to live
within the context of a process that may or may not be globally distributed. 

You may have to communicate with developers halfway around the world.  Or testers halfway around the world or
build engines or build managers halfway around the world. 

The complex environments that you have to deploy to in today's Web centric world basically make it much more
difficult to actually iterate on a timely basis so that you can do all of the testing before you actually go
into production and find that there are issues that manifest themselves in production. 

And even when you're in production, basically, getting consistency in understanding where the bugs are, where
the timing problems are, where the performance issues are, all of that requires that kind of IT lifecycle
management, if you will.  And a large part of where we are today is in the beginning stages of understanding
that for globally distributed development environments that are completely Web centric and open.

MICHAEL O’CONNELL: You mentioned open and yesterday you talked about Open Source and the fact we're
incorporating Open Source into our business strategy.  I was hoping to get a sense why you think that's
important for Rational, why that makes so much sense.  I know we're adopting some of the best practices into
the product development cycles internally but I imagine there's some other elements into the reasoning behind
that.

DANNY SABBAH: I started talking yesterday about the ideas behind the incorporation of larger and larger
communities.  And what we've learned from Open Source, and we had a one hour presentation this morning from
two guys who have lived the Open Source development model for the last four or five years, right?  And so what
we're trying to do is take and expand our base of best practices and start to incorporate the social
networking elements of the communities being created around the Internet and use that to help refine our
overall view of requirements, of testing, of quality, of understanding really where our products are, where
they need to be, and how they need to speak to our customers. 

And I think that Open Source, as you heard this morning, has a lot to say about that.  And it's a model that
we need to understand better and that we need to translate into our own evolution of understanding software
development.

SCOTT LANINGHAM:	Any other key take aways here we're missing? 

DANNY SABBAH: I think one of the things that we talked about today was the Jazz platform.  And one of the
things that I think needs to be made very clear is the fact that the Jazz platform is really giving us insight
into the way that development platforms and development systems, if you will, need to evolve in the future. 
And that's essentially a set of experiments that we're running.  It's a platform that we're starting to
define.  We will do that with the broader community. And we will also do that in cooperation and in concert,
if you will, with our existing products. 

So there's nothing, I just want to make clear with the existing audience, that there's nothing in the Jazz
platform that will inhibit them from taking advantage of some of the experimentation that we're doing in the
evolution of our existing products.

SCOTT LANINGHAM: What about just personal stuff from the conference?  Impressions, people you've spoken with,
anything that stands out that has been special for you so far? 

DANNY SABBAH: Yes, lots of surprise.  Lots of energy.  Lots of realization that Rational is really taking some
interesting and significant leaps forward and I think that people are, you know, starting to wake up and
realize that this is not the same old Rational.

SCOTT LANINGHAM: You going to go to, what is it tomorrow night, the big party at the theme park? Is that up
your alley? 

DANNY SABBAH: Unfortunately, they never give me enough time to be able to do things like that.  So I'm going
to have to get out of here before then.

SCOTT LANINGHAM: They don't have you doing customer interviews on one of the rides or something? 

DANNY SABBAH: No.  No, my ride days are a little bit behind me.  Actually, I have kids who are old enough
where even their ride days are behind them.  But we used to come down to the parks quite often and I've been
to some of those parties and it's a lot of fun.  But, unfortunately, they don't allow me to have a lot of fun
these days.

SCOTT LANINGHAM: It's great to talk to with you.  We appreciate you giving us a few moments. 

We've been talking with Danny Sabbah, general manager of IBM Rational Software.  I'm Scott Laningham with
Michael O'Connell for IBM developerWorks.
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