ORLANDO
-- Microsoft is crowing about poaching one of IBM’s
key tools developers just as IBM is holding
its annual Rational Software Development Conference here.
Microsoft
announced that Erich Gamma, former distinguished engineer at IBM
and a leader in creating IBM’s
Jazz next-generation collaborative development environment, has joined Microsoft. Gamma has been
considered the co-father of Jazz.
In
a
June 6 blog post, Jason Zander, corporate vice president for the Visual
Studio team in the Developer Division at Microsoft, said:
“Today
I am thrilled to announce that Erich Gamma will be joining the Visual Studio
team as a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer! Erich’s contributions have had
a huge impact on the software industry. Erich has a passion for shipping
high quality, elegant software, something he shared with the community as
co-author of Design
Patterns.
He has always had a passion for building tools to make
development more productive and pleasant. Together with Kent Beck he
developed
the JUnit unit test framework. He was one of the key technical leads of
the
Eclipse project and he has led the Eclipse Java Development tools.
Recently his focus was on making teams more effective. He was an
initial member
of the Jazz project and the technical lead of Rational Team Concert.
Finally,
Erich has worked to bring teams together across the application life
cycle and
he was the lead of Rational's Collaborative Lifecycle Management
effort.”
The
timing of the Microsoft announcement could not be more calculated as it came on
the same day IBM held opening keynotes at
its IBM Innovate
2011 conference here. In his keynote, Kristof Kloeckner, general manager of
IBM Rational, said the new products IBM announced at the conference were all
based on Jazz.
An
IBM press release on the new software
announced at Innovate said:
“The
new software offerings are built on Jazz, IBM's
open software development platform that supports sharing and interactions among
software and systems design and development teams. New features allow
developers to interact quickly; sharing data instantaneously from any source in
the development process and connect teams and development communities in new
ways.”
When
Microsoft initially set out to build an ALM (application lifecycle management)
platform and to deliver its VSTS (Visual Studio Team System) and TFS (Team Foundation Server) solutions to compete with IBM and Rational, the software giant hired
several former Rational engineers to get its strategy and products off the
ground. Now, as VSTS and TFS have made considerable headway in the ALM space,
Microsoft has come back to nab one of IBM’s ALM experts, as well as one of the
few people intimately familiar with IBM’s Jazz, its collaborative development push
and its plans to better integrate the development and operations roles in the
enterprise IT environment. Gamma is intimately familiar with those plans
because he has been involved with Jazz from its outset.
Discussing
the Microsoft/IBM competition in the ALM
tools arena in
a 2005 interview with eWEEK, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said:
“We
looked at Rational before IBM bought it. The
number of actual seats and users they have is tiny. And so if you can take some
of the good concepts and put them in an ease-of-use package and at a price
point that you can get out, I think developers want this stuff you just have to
make it easy enough to use and at the right price.
“And
I think with Visual Studio Team System we have that. And I would expect to see
our share of high-end software life cycle seats to really climb quite
dramatically for the next year.”
Asked
for comment at IBM Innovate 2011, an IBM
spokeswoman said IBM does not comment on personnel
issue, but that the company has several Jazz experts on hand at the conference if
more information on Jazz is required.
However,
one particular Jazz expert, Erich Gamma, is not in attendance. And his absence
is apparent. Microsoft’s Zander said Gamma will join Microsoft in August.
“Erich will continue to live and work out of Zurich,
Switzerland, where we will
be opening a small Visual Studio development lab with Erich as the lead,”
Zander said in his blog post.
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