Rational Permeates IBM`s Software DNA

Meanwhile, as IBM is known for its vast services organization, Rational has had influence there as well. "The services guys are on a track to be more effective with assets," Sabbah said. "They focus on delivering value and innovation by leveraging pre-existing frameworks."

In addition, not just the IBM services group, but all of IBM, uses a tailored version of RUP (Rational Unified Process), a software development methodology created at Rational, for creating software. The version used internally is known as IRUP for IBM RUP.

Grady Booch, an IBM fellow and chief scientist at IBM Rational, said one byproduct of IBM's acquisition of Rational is that "it has gotten us deeper into the enterprise than we could have gotten on our own." Yet, Booch, who was a longtime Rational employee prior to the IBM acquisition, also noted that the organization under IBM tends to focus less on some of the more technical markets where Rational had legacy customers.

However, with IBM's pending acquisition of Telelogic, that is likely to change rapidly, IBM officials said.

IBM announced its intent to acquire Malmo, Sweden-based Telelogic last June, but approval of the deal has been held up while the European Commission evaluates antitrust issues.

Swati Moran, the market integration lead for the pending Telelogic acquisition, said that should the deal be approved, Telelogic would be moving under the IBM Rational brand and Telelogic's tools would play a key role in "helping our customers be successful in this space"—this space being the complex systems development market, she said.

When IBM acquired Rational, the company provided broad support for both Java and .Net platforms. But, under IBM, Rational quickly adopted the Eclipse framework as the basis for its ongoing development. So Rational became more of a Java shop.

However, "we weren't looking at [acquiring] Rational as a shot against Microsoft," Mills said.

Small and midsize businesses will become an increasingly important target segment for Rational, Sabbah said. Rational will announce more "Express" offerings to allow smaller organizations to take advantage of the same collaborative and secure development software that enterprises are already using from Rational, he said.