developerWorks: Here now is Martin Nally, IBM® Fellow and Rational® chief technology officer, being interviewed by Michael O'Connell at the Rational Software Development Conference 2008.

Nally: This conference for me is a really exciting conference. I think you probably saw the attendance numbers (3,500 people), which is fabulous. And I also think that the announcements we're making at this conference are extremely strong — strongest we've had in years. And I think the level of interest and excitement of the customers reflects the kind of strong announcements that we've made.

One of the themes that certainly ties those announcements together is Jazz. And so I thought one thing that might be interesting is for me to give my personal view on what that really means and why Jazz is so interesting, and what Jazz really means across our portfolio. The key to software development is really bringing together a bunch of specialists across a very broad set of stakeholders, all the way from business analysts who work with the business people to define what a software development solution should do, all the way through architecture, development, tests, and ultimate delivery of the software.

And there's also a great deal of diversity in the way that people do this, from very tightly integrated Agile teams to teams where there's a great deal of outsourcing to teams that are heavily influenced by the fact that they're doing packaged applications, and, therefore, their tool suites and process flows are heavily influenced by the environments that they work with. So this is a very complicated space.

Historically, we've had good tools that focused on particular aspects of this configuration management, change management, release management, architecture management, requirements management, and so on and so forth. And over time, we've built bridges between those tools to try to bring together an overall development cycle. The thing that's really exciting to me about Jazz is that it's an initiative that raises the level of integration of data and process across that whole life cycle.

So instead of individual tools with bridges between them, we can build a uniform data space that describes all of the data of that software development cycle, all the way from requirements through engineering artifacts to tests and, ultimately, to deployment. And the same with process, we have a much more holistic view of how process can be supported, encouraged, even enforced, across all of those stakeholders.

So what I see in Jazz is an evolution of our tools. In some cases, new tools. We announced Rational Team Concert, we announced Rational Quality Manager, we announced Rational Requirements Composer as three exciting tools that were built sort of from ground up in this vision. But in some ways, almost a bigger story is the evolution of our entire tool suite — not just new tools, but our entire tool suite — to integrate with this Jazz vision. So the thing I'm excited about is incremental delivery of improvements to existing Rational tools, to Telelogic tools and to third-party tools that integrate into this Jazz vision to bring a complete solution across our brand. So the excitement, great excitement, around new introductions, but to me, equal excitement around the evolution of existing products to integrate with this vision.

developerWorks: You covered a lot of important things in terms of what are really the key things going on at the conference right now insofar as the priorities. As you're talking and detailing those, I'm thinking maybe it would be helpful for the developerWorks community to get into the value proposition for that evolution you just described.

Nally: The value proposition to me is enabling people to gather together information at all of the levels, all of the different levels in the organization, that need information. So if I'm a developer, what I need is clear information about my defect backlog, the condition of the builds, the activities of the other developers that I'm coordinating with, how I interact with them, so on and so forth. If I'm a project manager, what I need is more overall information about milestones, how we're delivering on milestones, what the quality trends are, and so on. If I'm trying to manage a large organization of projects, I'm looking for this information that helps me understand what's the portfolio of applications that I already have in place. How do they relate to each other? If I need to make a change in order to support an initiative of the business, what are the applications that are going to be affected? What's the new development that I have to do? When can I incrementally change something existing? So on and so forth.

So there are different — according to my development model and according to my role in the development process — there are different kinds of information that I'm going to need. But in all cases, what I need is transparency — transparency into what's happening in the development organizations, in the projects, transparency into my overall portfolio so that I can understand the architecture, the design, the way that my systems fit together, and, therefore, do planning on how I'm going to evolve that.

So a lot of what we see in Jazz ... I think there are two big themes. One is around collaboration, how people communicate with each other. And the other one's around data integration. How do we make sure that the right information is freely available and visible to the right people at the right time?

developerWorks: One thing that came up, thinking back to last year's conference, there was some discussion about Jazz, some subset of Jazz being offered as open source. Can you tell us what's going on in that realm?

Nally: Yes. And we've moved to deliver on that promise this year. So we're announcing a set of technologies, a mixture of specifications and code that we're offering under an open source license called open services for life-cycle collaboration. And what we've realized is that the primary value proposition of Jazz is around data and process integration. And the best way that we can deliver that integration architecture is actually not through extensive implementation libraries, not through Java frameworks, but rather, through a specification of the protocols you need to implement in order to integrate with other tools built to this architecture.

So you're trying to integrate around data. You're trying to integrate around process. You're trying to integrate around things like common approaches to user administration and permissions. And we believe that the primary value is how you integrate in a service-oriented style around protocols. So what we're focusing on is specifying those services and the protocols that support them and on providing example implementations and example server and example clients that show how this works.

So rather than delivering implementation frameworks that require people — first of all, to rewrite, and secondarily, to rewrite on a language or server technology that we choose — it's much more powerful to expose the service interfaces and protocols and then allow people to integrate using or to implement using the technologies ... languages and technologies of their choice. It also gives a much more incremental path, both for our own products and for our business partner products, and to integrate without requiring large technology migrations. And having said that, implementation libraries are still extremely important. And we will provide implementation libraries at least for the Java™ language that make it easy to develop, to integrate those protocols into applications.

While I'm on a roll here, I'd like to say a little more about Telelogic. I mentioned Telelogic in passing, but Telelogic is one of the biggest pieces of news in this conference. So the Telelogic acquisition, although it was announced last year, only closed recently. And we're beginning to make much more progress in understanding what the roadmaps are. And I'm extremely positive on two fronts. One is, I'm extremely excited about the opportunity that Telelogic brings for us to bring a new level of value to a segment of the market that we had been underserving in the past. I'm also extremely excited about the potential for Telelogic technologies to bring value to our existing markets and our existing customers.

I'm extremely positive about the way that the technology teams across Telelogic and Rational have started to engage together, to plan futures together. And the level of excitement within the engineering teams about the future that we can chart together is really very high, which is an extremely valuable thing and was not at all inevitable.

So I'm really extremely, extremely pleased, extremely optimistic about the future that we can chart together. And I think this Jazz integration architecture, the ability to bring together both new technologies and existing products into an architecture that can integrate them, integrate data and process more tightly, is really going to provide both companies with an opportunity to bring an increased level of value across a broad range of customers. So this is really a very exciting thing for us.

developerWorks: I guess every time IBM acquires another company, it makes this integration puzzle all the more important for IBM to solve on many levels — the business level, the process level, the development models — from top to bottom. And I'd imagine perhaps that helps IBM be successful in solving the same types of problems for its customers, its clients. Are there any specific examples of that that you wanted to point out? I know Steve talked about how IBM is a model of success in terms of being one of the largest software development organizations in the world today.

Nally: Anytime you acquire companies, it brings challenges and opportunities. In the case of Telelogic, I believe that the synergy between the products and the cultural match of our engineering teams — and not just our engineering teams, but the cultural match across our companies — is really very high. And so different acquisitions, I think, have different levels of challenge, although I think IBM has been extremely skilled in integrating technologies and doing multiple acquisitions and integrating them. But I'm also very optimistic that Telelogic will be one of our biggest successes and that the alignments are really very strong.

developerWorks: One other thing I wanted to ask you about, Martin, was yesterday there was a press conference. And I believe you were talking all about how your experience is Jazz integration is best done on the Internet. Is that correct?

Nally: So I think this is one of the key things that plays in our favor. And we have a huge focus in IBM on Service-Oriented Architectures. It's something we use internally and that we also promote with our customers. And service oriented ... there are different views on Service-Oriented Architecture, all of them valid. The aspect of Service-Oriented Architecture that I'm focused on in this context is the ability to achieve loose coupling between systems to create an overall system by loosely coupling systems that are modeled as services and to link those together with Internet protocols. And this is the foundation of the Jazz vision. The way in which we integrate data and process in Jazz is through a set of service integrations, or service definitions, that are founded on Internet protocols.

And there are many reasons why the Internet is so significant here. The scale of the Internet is something that works in our favor, the scope of the Internet, all data can be integrated across the Internet regardless of the implementation technology or the storage technology behind it. And the other thing is the explosion of innovation on the Internet, especially in collaboration, which is really the core problem of software development. So all the innovation that happens in wikis and blogs and feedback mechanisms and mash-up technologies, all of this can be brought to bear to help solve the problems that we have in software development.

So combining the innovation of the Internet, the architectural principles of Service-Oriented Architecture founded on the Internet, putting the Internet at the center of things, gives us a hub. And also exploiting the scale of the Internet ... or the scope of the Internet to solve globally distributed problems, both distribution across geographies and even distribution across legal entities as companies are involved in more and more complicated partnering arrangements or outsourcing arrangements to deliver software. All of these things bring you back to the Internet as being a powerful driver and a force to exploit.

developerWorks: Would it be also fair to say that that means you have resources you might have applied to a problem that you can now instead deploy on other issues and let the Internet take care of some of the challenges?

Nally: Absolutely. One of the things that I think is always very hard for engineering organizations is to figure out how much actually needs to be invented. And the more you invent, the more you have to work at driving adoption, documentation, so on and so forth. The more standard stuff that we can exploit on the Internet, the more that problem is solved before we start. So adopting HTTP and REST. For example, HTTP get post-delete, the notion of resources are identified by URLs. This is a very powerful, pervasive kind of model that's used, essentially, at least in some form, by a billion people on the Internet. It's the fundamentals of how HTTP and HTML work. And there's a huge body of understanding and documentation around this that's already in place.

And our customers have a huge amount of investment. Almost all of our customers are already investing in sizable infrastructure to support that kind of communication and those kind of protocols. So how you manage Internets, intranets, firewalls, security issues, many of these things were ... by building on top of Internet practices and Internet technologies, we get to exploit a very large amount of investment that's already been put in place by customers.

developerWorks: And I know one of the tricks also to not having to invest a lot in inventing new stuff is also reuse, and that's one of the key points of this morning's keynotes. Wondering if you had any observations either from the keynote today, keynote yesterday, talking with press and analysts, or talking with customers so far at the conference.

Nally: I've been involved in a number of sessions. I came here early on Saturday so I could participate in the voice sessions on Sunday. And I was extremely impressed at the quality of the dialogue that was happening at the voice sessions. First of all, I was impressed by IBM's teams, the degree to which they had prepared the right kind of material and were getting provocative ideas in front of customers and engaged in a very open dialogue of things we might do in the future and getting customer feedback on that. I was also extremely impressed by the customer participants that they were insightful, energetic, willing to share and passionate about being involved in the creative process of setting direction for our product. Sunday really got the conference off to an extremely positive start for me. And the keynotes have been both informative and entertaining. I've enjoyed the energy. I've enjoyed, you know, the lighter side, as well as the sort of technical sides of this. So far, I think it's been a great conference.

The other thing I would mention — this is very typical of conferences — is always the value you get from the side conversations. I have had some side conversations with several customers already that have really helped me understand how our customers are trying to do software development, what their environment looks like, what their partnering relationship looks like, what their internal organization looks like, and how they make, how they divide up responsibility and how they make decisions. And understanding that context and being able to imagine how our products will integrate and provide value in that context is really very, very important. Understanding our customer context is really one of the hardest things, but also one of the most important things for anybody who is trying to imagine the future of our products.

developerWorks: Makes me wonder to what degree this challenge of a globally distributed development team would be extended ... to try and get that same perspective you get from a side conversation somehow without having to be physically present in the same space.

Nally: So I think that's a great point. And I've had direct feedback both on the new RFE process and also on the kind of open, the transparent commercial development that we're doing at Jazz.net. And the feedback I've gotten back from customers at least has been extremely positive on both counts. So our customers really seem to value the opportunity to have a higher-bandwidth dialogue and a more-transparent dialogue with us. And I think our customers understand that there are risks on both sides involved in this. If we start to show them much more detail of our own thought processes as they evolve, there will inevitably be more false starts, more twists and turns in the road. And the feedback I've had from customers is that they understand this well and they see that the value of the open dialogue far and away outweighs the downside of being exposed to more changeability, more uncertainty.

I think customers really crave this. In fact, I've been challenged by customers to go even further. I had one customer challenge us to allow them to give feedback reviews on our products directly on our Web sites. And I'm sure that's going to be a challenging concept for many, many people within IBM who are used to having a much more sort of controlled dialogue around our products. And I'm not advocating one point or the other. I'm simply noting that I think that the desire for more openness and more communication is really an inevitable thing that's going to grow. And I think we have to manage this responsibly, but we also have to recognize that this is a clear direction that we have to respond to.

And us having a positive response to it and trying to sort of help set the program, there will be a much more positive experience both for IBM and its customers than if we drag our feet on it.

developerWorks: That was Michael O'Connell talking with Martin Nally, IBM Fellow and Rational Chief Technology Officer. Hear more podcast segments from the Rational Software Development Conference 2008 at ibm.com/developerworks. This has been a developerWorks podcast.

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About the author

Michael O'Connell is the founding Editor-in-chief and editorial director of IBM's developerWorks site, which launched in 1999. Before joining developerWorks, he served as founding Editor-in-chief of IDG's JavaWorld and a founding editor of SunWorld Online -- two of the industry's first successful Web-based technology magazines. He's been a computer journalist since 1991.

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