During Innovate last week, I provided an overview of the announcements about our spring launch for product & systems teams. Today, I'd like to give you a few details about our announcements geared for IT organizations.

There are three key areas of capability that will help IT organizations:

• Accelerate delivery through improved integration across the application lifecycle
• Reduce cost and create new business value by expanding application lifecycle management beyond the development team
• Improve flexibility and boost productivity by leveraging the broader development community

Let's take a look at each of these.

Accelerating the application delivery lifecycle

Our five imperatives for effective application lifecycle management -- in-context collaboration, real-time planning, lifecycle traceability, development intelligence, and continuous improvement -- have been been extended with design management capabilities. This ensures that design is integrated with the rest of the application lifecycle and the design team is able to seamlessly collaborate with key stakeholders from across the extended team.

Our application lifecycle solution is called "collaborative lifecycle management" (CLM) and features several enhancements in the area of testing. IBM Rational Test Workbench v8.0 and IBM Continuous Integration Solution for System z support continuous integration by enabling automated testing across all application layers.

In addition, IT teams will be able to speed their delivery cycles via a virtualized testing environment, based on the cloud. Imagine a project that needs to be deployed to hundreds of servers: How does a business the reliability and availability of this application? Instead of renting, scheduling, and setting up temporary hardware, with all the coordination that involves, teams can plug into the cloud instead, and thereby reduce infrastructure costs and the time involved in the set up of traditional test environments.

Expanding lifecycle management

We are expanding your ability to govern the development and delivery process from core development needs to operations teams via enhanced collaborative development and operations (DevOps). New capabilities include:

• Continuous Release: Build automation to integrate new or changed code on a frequent basis
• Continuous Integration: Deploy integrated software in production-like environments, running tests and releasing software for production rollouts
• Continuous Deployment: Automate deployment of working software to production environments
• Service Management: Visibility, Control, and Automation across the service lifecycle

CLM has also been extended with the IBM Mobile Platform for centralized code sharing and distributed mobile application builds. This new mobile solution offers:

• Improve alignment between business and development
• Speed time-to-market by breaking down silos, improving hand-offs, and visibility of project status
• Deliver a high-quality user experience by aligning business analysts, designers and developers
• Integrate with the IBM Mobile Platform for centralized code sharing and distributed mobile application builds

Improving the IT application delivery ecosystem

Finally, we our helping you improve flexibility and boost productivity by leveraging the broader development ecosystem, and we're focusing on two areas -- Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) and skills.

OSLC
Now clients can leverage OSLC to integrate more products -- not just our own Jazz-based tools, but also includes ClearQuest, DOORS, and Tivoli Service Request Manager. Furthermore, a variety of tools from other vendors may be included, including Oracle, Microsoft, HP, Atlassian, and open source.

Skills
When Information Week recently reported that CIOs rank "Attracting, Developing, Retaining IT Pros" as their number one worry, and we've seen a worrying drop in the number of computer science majors over the past decade. So, IBM is partnering with schools, colleges, and universities to help educate millions of students in open standards(based software delivery. This includes virtual classroom offerings, sand-boxed based community offerings, and more:

• Brand new IBM PureSystems Trial powered by SmartCloud Build skills, deploy apps using pattern-based approach in the cloud
• Enhancements to the JazzHub which enable users to build software with classmates across the room or across the globe

Please take a look at more details on these announcements for IT teams and don't hesitate to leave comments here with any question you might have!

Gina Poole

VP of Marketing, IBM Rational