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LAS VEGAS—IBM Monday delivered on its strategy of business-driven development by releasing a slew of new technology and services to help business, development and operations mesh to improve IT lifecycle management.
During the opening day of the IBM Rational Software Development Conference here, the company released its first set of tools that link the Rational development tool set with IBMs Tivoli systems management technology suite.
And in a somewhat historic moment, IBM and attendees watched Rational co-founder and outgoing general manager of the Rational Software division of IBMs Software Group, Mike Devlin, pass the baton to Danny Sabbah, the newly announced GM of Rational. Sabbah hugged Devlin onstage and the audience gave Devlin a sustained standing ovation.
“Its appropriate that my last week with Rational is here at the Rational conference,” Devlin said.
“Even though Im retiring Im very pleased IBM is bringing in one of its most senior people to lead Rational,” he added.
Sabbah said of Devlin: “Hes left me quite a legacy. Mike gave us the last 25 years of his help and discipline.”
Meanwhile, Sabbah said Rationals task is to “evolve patterns of success in software engineering.”
To that end, IBM announced new software to help automatically identify and repair business application problems, enabling development teams and IT operations staff to share information about application performance. The new software measures application performance in production and identifies problems as they occur, sending a problem report back to the developer.
The two new solutions are the IBM Problem Resolution Toolkit for Rational Application Developer and the IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit for Rational Performance Tester. Lee Nackman, vice president of product development and customer support, said the new technology is especially useful for organizations implementing SOAs (service-oriented architectures).
In fact, Sabbah said that although IBM is not announcing an SOA SDK (software development kit), the company basically has such a thing in use by its IBM Global Services unit.
Joshua Barnes, a software architect with Ajilon Consulting, who has been using Rationals Rational Unified Process and its tool set on assignment at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, said he believes the new problem resolution and performance optimization tools have the potential to enhance the quality of applications and save time and money for user organizations. “Itll speed up the ability to address problems and performance issues,” he said.
Among the new service offerings, IBM announced the IBM Standard Deployment Service for Rational Portfolio Manager, IBM Fast Track Deployment Service for Rational Portfolio Manager and IBM Rational Project/Program Management Assessment Service. IBM also announced IBM Software Release and Deployment Service, which facilitates the use of IBM Rational ClearCase and IBM Rational ClearQuest with the companys Tivoli Configuration Manager.
Meanwhile, IBM announced new software quality tools, including tools to focus on Siebel Systems Inc. applications. IBM announced the IBM Rational Performance Tester, the IBM Rational Functional Tester Extension for Siebel Test Automation, and the IBM Rational Performance Tester Extension for Siebel Test Automation.