IBM Rational community

We're calling on Ali Manji, a Rational software developer who joined the reporting tools team in January. His name should sound familiar to you because he has written several articles to help clients build leading-edge Java applications with Rational Software Architect and Rational Application Developer. Don't let his recent transition fool you. He is a man of many talents, which is why he was easily motivated to get on board with his new team and write this week's feature article, Tricks for deploying Rational Insight 1.0 in a large enterprise. 

Q1) Which future standards do you and your colleagues see as important for the future?

Arthur Ryman, who is Rational’s Chief Architect for Reporting and Portfolio Strategy and Management, as well as the visionary who charts the future for our area, tells me that standards around RDF, SPARQL, and Linked Data will become critical for CLM solution providers. More generally, these standards will also be important for those who want to build solutions based on the growing NoSQL movement. I believe this further implies that standards for NoSQL will become necessary and critical.

Q2) What challenges are you expecting from your new assignment?

As is the case with many of our clients, my development team is globally dispersed. Collaboration through the use of social networking and development tools like Rational Team Concert becomes critical to project success and fostering a team culture with peers in other [areas of the world].

Q3) What inspired you to write an article on this specific topic?

We wanted to ensure that the architects tasked with deploying Rational Insight were aware of the options available for deploying in medium- to large-sized enterprises. Realizing an enterprise topology as described in the article is an important step towards the goals that users demand: scalability and performance.

Q4) If you could win a meetup with any celebrity or public figure in the world, who would it be, and what would you talk about?

Noam Chomsky. His contributions to computing are immense. It would be interesting to hear his thoughts on the direction of modern computer languages and their applications in the era of social computing.

Q5) What do you like to do for fun?

I love to play badminton and read juvenile literature. Books that are my "must reads:" The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Conch Bearer, and Silvana de Mari’s The Last Dragon. I also like to play board games.  

Ali has spoken at many technical conferences, including JavaOne and IBM Innovate. This month, you can catch up with him in person when he speaks about Tips and techniques for using Eclipse Dali tools to deploy JPA/JEE apps anywhere! at EclipseCon, March 26-29, 2012.

Ali appreciates suggestions for a future articles or blog posts you want to see about using or deploying Rational Insight in an enterprise environment. You can find more tips and thoughts from him on his self-titled blog, or you can follow him on twitter @torontoIBMer

As a developer, wouldn't you love to log in and simply have all of the development, test and deployment environments that you need at your fingertips? Steve Abrams, Chief Cloud Architect, and Timothy Hahn, Chief Architect for Enterprise Modernization Tools describe what PureSystems really means for development teams. Both are IBM Distinguished Engineers and authors of last week's featured article about IBM PureSystems, the new expert integrated systems approach to IT.

What does PureSystems mean for practitioners and software engineers?

Steve: With PureSystems, developers can focus on development and not worry about details of infrastructure and configuration. Especially with PureApplication Systems, the patterns mean that developers can easily build applications that everyone can be confident will work and perform well in production. This will dramatically reduce the amount of time, money, and effort wasted by development teams tracking down what turn out to be configuration errors, rather than application defects. 

Tim: PureSystems represents a significant advance in how practitioners and software engineers will use their computing resources. PureSystems will make it possible for software engineers to get access to high-performance computing systems quickly, and just for the time they need to use it, to develop and test their applications. For system administrators, PureSystems represents a new way of managing their computing infrastructure. Administrators can concentrate on managing system images (rather than a bevy of individual instances) and can devote more time to innovating new application architecture models. By automating the instantiation and setup of systems and applications, the mundane tasks of system administration are handled by the system itself, which enables people to concentrate on new solutions.

By using PureSystems capabilities, how can development teams realize increased productivity on both new and existing applications?

Steve: Typically, availability of test hardware is a major bottleneck in the application lifecycle. PureSystems makes it simple for teams to quickly get access to production-like environments for testing purposes, virtually eliminating this bottleneck. Further, teams can connect PureSystems to a continuous integration process and automatically get continuous, realistic feedback on the quality of the application throughout the development cycle. The simple application onboarding process means that this benefit extends equally to new and existing applications.  

Tim: Development teams should be looking at PureSystems as a means of getting access to server-level computing resources quickly, easily, and just at the time that they need them to deploy and test applications. Development teams should no longer feel the need to manage loads of small desktop systems in order to cobble together an approximation of a server-level infrastructure. Now, developers can get an instance of exactly what the eventual deployment environment will be for their applications, run their applications in that environment, and then return that instance to the resource pool, confident that they will get those resources again the next time that they need to test their applications.  Without the burden of managing their own systems, developers can spend their time creating innovative applications.

What is the one action that you have taken that has accounted for most of your success?

Steve: Asking questions. Too often, people are afraid to ask questions, and that limits their ability to succeed. I can't think of a time when asking a good, hard, clarifying question did anything to impede progress. More often than not, the questions reveal the critical next steps for success.

Tim: The one action I have taken is to always be curious, inquisitive, and ready to take on a challenge that I wasn't expecting to come my way.

What interests you outside of your job (hobbies, activities)?

Steve: I love photography. I don't take pictures as well or as often as I would like, but I still love it (mandatory shameless plug: http://bit.ly/Ipnw0J). 

Tim: I am an active triathlete, competing in sprint and international distance events. I also enjoy scuba diving.

What books have influenced your ideas and thoughts the most?

Steve: Lately, many of the books that I've read relate to the course that I teach at Columbia University. A current favorite is Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. It provides a nice, flexible structure for defining and understanding business models. Even in a large company like IBM, innovative, entrepreneurial thinking about changing and emerging business models is critical to our success. 

Tim: I read mostly fiction when not reading for work. One of my favorite books is Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. However, The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman is one book that I enjoyed that also has helped me realize the potential of our global society.

You can read their article, IBM PureSystems: A game changer in the development, deployment, and management of IT applications, on developerWorks.

Have you already looked at PureSystems? What have you read? Is there anything that Steve or Tim can help you with? Leave a comment here or at the end of their article.

Rational community roll call...that has a nice ring to it. Let's do it!

So, the first person we're calling on is Steve Arnold, an IT Specialist for Rational software and the author of this week's featured article. He lives in Twickenham, London with his wife and 5-year-old daughter. Besides time spent with his family, he has studied, practiced and taught Tai Chi for more than 14 years.

I've just finished delivering enablement to my European colleagues on Rational Design Manager, and the new features coming later this year, and I'm really looking forward to sharing some of the new capabilities with customers in the coming months. I'm also really excited by the sudden increase in interest around DevOps and continuous deployment -- and pleased that one of Rational's 'hidden gems' has a chance for bit of limelight.