News

Source: Embedded Systems Development, March 2009, Aberdeen Group

As demand increases for products that are digitally aware and interconnected, IBM (NYSE:IBM) today announced a new software platform and related services to help product manufacturers and designers create innovative products that help people work and live smarter.

Businesses serving every market segment are finding new ways to deliver greater value with innovative smarter products featuring capabilities that can only be provided by software. These same organisations often struggle with increasingly complex design environments. The software and services announced today will provide capabilities that support collaboration, and help reduce the cost and risk of bringing more intelligent, instrumented and interconnected products to market.

Sixty-six percent of product manufacturers turn to software-driven product innovation.
Software also plays an increasingly significant role in maintaining and improving key business success factors such as customer satisfaction, safety ratings, product reliability, profitable cost and risk models and an organisations' overall image as an innovator. According to Aberdeen Research**, 66 percent of product manufacturers are turning to software to drive product innovation; and of those companies, those that have build a best-of-class competency in software are infusing 4.4 times more software into their products. They are also 19 percent more likely to meet their revenue targets than the industry average. However, along with the competitive edge that software can bring to manufacturers that embed innovative software features into their products is a higher level of complexity that comes with the marriage of software, electronics and IT systems.

"While this transformation is sparking unprecedented leaps in product value, it also introduces new challenges and business implications," said Kalyan Sridhar of IBM Rational Software. "Whether we are at work, home or play, people of all ages have come to depend on products with features relying on increasing amounts of software-based intelligence. The successful organisations of the future will build a strong competency in delivering that software fused with sensor and electro-mechanical technologies to create products that are increasingly intelligent, instrumented and interconnected to the Internet and other systems. IBM helps its customers seize and effectively deliver on these new opportunities.”

New IBM software provides an integrated systems and software delivery platform
The IBM software announced today will provide a fully integrated software delivery platform that addresses requirements, design, development and management across electrical, mechanical and software technologies and helps organisations derive the greatest value from the products they deliver.

• Designing products that are increasingly intelligent, instrumented and interconnected often requires collaboration between numerous teams using a range of design techniques. IBM is unveiling IBM Rational Team Webtop, the integrated user front-end for the platform powered by Jazz. Team Webtop will help increase communication and productivity throughout these extended product design teams by presenting information from multiple software delivery tools across the workflow in a single Web-based view.
• IBM Rational DOORS is also being enhanced with new features that will allow teams to avoid paper-based review processes by managing the complex and multi-layered requirements of smart products and systems of systems through an easy-to-use Web interface. The new version of DOORS enables an expanded set of stakeholders to review, analyse and modify requirements data using the Web.
• IBM Rational Change and IBM Rational Synergy are being updated to help companies improve application quality by more accurately and efficiently identifying the specific stages of complex, multi-step processes used when developing smarter products.
• The new version of IBM Rational Team Concert, which is based on the IBM Jazz technology platform, will provide new levels of scalability and security to enable collaborative, agile development among distributed product teams. In addition, select Rational systems development products will be integrated into the IBM Jazz technology platform, providing greater collaboration across the development lifecycle, which will allow people to work together regardless of location.
• New features in IBM Rational Rhapsody will help customers bring products to market faster with new agile software development workflow and modeling capabilities to deliver complex systems before the software, hardware and electronics come together. This helps identify and correct potential design flaws as early as possible.

New Solutions Experience Lab, Consulting Services
The IBM Rational software offerings announced today also include services that build on IBM’s expertise and experience helping customers deliver innovative products.

This week, IBM opened its first Solutions Experience Lab for Systems Engineering and Embedded Software at the IBM Innovation Center (IIC) located in Waltham, Massachusetts. The Solutions Experience Lab provides a venue where customers can explore smarter product design using solutions from IBM and its business partners. The facility will also provide customers, business partners and members of the academic community access to systems engineering and embedded software education via symposiums and workshops. Many more countries will soon be launching the labs in- country.

In addition, IBM Global Business Services (GBS), the world's largest consulting services organisation, has a Systems Engineering and Embedded Software Services business that is helping customers identify areas of opportunity and manage the product design, software delivery and organisational change associated with delivering smarter products. IBM’s programs also extend into research and development.

Availability
IBM Rational Team Webtop is available now. New features and integrations for IBM Rational Team Concert, IBM Rational Change, IBM Rational DOORS, IBM Rational Rhapsody and IBM Rational Synergy will be available in June 2009.

For more information, please contact:
Vaidyanathan (Vinod) Venkataraman
IBM Corporate Communications
Ph: +91 98450 33306
E-mail: vaivenka@in.ibm.com