IBM 'Rationalizes' Tool Strategy

The move comes nearly a year to the date of IBM's announced plans to buy Rational, a Lexington, Mass-based provider of development tools, for $2 billion. The deal was completed in February. (See related story.)

IBM executives said the shift will help clarify what solution providers say is a sometimes bewildering array of IBM tools, most carrying the WebSphere label.

"There is some redundancy and overlap and we'll try to eliminate that. Will that cause us to change the packaging of some things? Yes. Do we know today what those changes will be? No," Mike Devlin, general manager of IBM Rational told CRN.

Rational's portfolio already comprises Rational Rose modeling software and ClearCase change management software. The J2EE-centric WebSphere Studio now joins that portfolio. Since IBM, with its huge J2EE and Linux focus, bought Rational, many solution providers worry that Rational will foresake its platform-agnostic view. Rational supports both Microsoft's .Net and the J2EE game plans.

Some solution providers contend that IBM-lead Rational has not kept its .Net products on par with the J2EE offerings and fear that as Rational moves more into the IBM sphere and bases its offerings on Eclipse work, that it will further scale down .Net plans.

The Rational executives, to a man, claim that this is not true. Most estimates show there will be a 50/50 split between Java and .Net going forward and IBM will not jeopardize that business, said Buell Duncan, IBM Software's general manager for developer relations.

Rational, with additional offices in Cupertino, Calif., Ottawa Ontario and Raleigh, N.C., will lead IBM's software development efforts "even though we won't necessarily build all the tools," said Eric Schurr, vice president of marketing for Rational/IBM.

In many ways this move is analogous to IBM's converging of collaborative technologies, including the WebSphere portal, into its Lotus group in Cambridge, Mass. However, while it took IBM nearly seven years to bring Lotus fully into the fold, it moved at warp speed to integrate Rational, Schurr said.

Rational will also tap into a rich trove of IBM Research, said Grady Booch, a Rational veteran and newly named IBM Fellow.

But the key to applying technologies is to simplify their use. "Developers don't need more technologies but the consolidation of existing technologies so they can focus on what they do," Booch said.

The trend will be for development tools to be easier to use collaboratively by dispersed development groups. "As more work is outsourced, development will become even more distributed . We need to get them virtually in one place," he noted. Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) will also come to the fore. In this worldview, first espoused by Xerox PARC and which IBM is exploring in its Hursley, U.K. Lab, development goes back to fundamentals, Booch said.

Most development now takes the view of all those involved in the process - security experts, business logic gurus, and actual coders and weave those views together and then develop software. AOP, by contrast, separates the concerns of all those stakeholders up front and then applies automation to weave their views together into a hopefully-coherent whole.

In other news, IBM Software is updating its WebSphere line with support for Java Server Faces and JDK 1.4. WebSphere Application Server 5.1 and Application Server Express 5.1 will be updated with this support December 19. WebSphere Studio Version 5.1.1 will be available December 30, IBM said.

JDK 1.4 support will mean enhanced security and XML support and better support for debugging, said Bob Sutor, director of WebSphere Infrastructure Software. "You'll be able to do a hot swap,a developer can change a method without shutting down," he said. Java Server Faces is an emerging standard and supportive software will give developers easy drag-and-drop functionality, Sutor said. Sun Microsystems has promised Java Server Faces support in its upcoming http://crn.channelsupersearch.com/news/crn/44274.asp Project Rave rapid application development offering.

As part of its win-over developers effort, IBM this week also launched a revamped developerWorks website, according to Duncan. The group is also upping the number of IBM-hosted developer events from 120 this year to 400 in 2004, Duncan said.