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What follows is my podcast with David Locke, Director of Offerings for IBM Rational, where we dive into the hot topic of the day, collaboration, and how IBM Rational's new Jazz collaborative technology is built for the flattening of the workplace (in this case software development), and how we're all pretty much expected to get our work done from anywhere and everywhere with co-workers half-a-world away. So give it a listen, or read the full transcript below.
Listen to or download the 9:18 minute podcast below:
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First of all, David, can you just give me a quick overview of your announcement for IBM Rational’s Jazz collaborative technology?
You bet. So in this announcement, we’re announcing 11 new products based on the Jazz technology. So Peter, as you may recall, we’ve been working on Jazz for about two years. The development style of Jazz is what we call “Open Commercial”. So I’m sure your audience is familiar with Open Source. There’s many, many folks out there that want to contribute their abilities and their knowledge and their skills to creating better software.
The challenge with Open Source though is that there’s really no place to get training, no place to get support, and as some companies have merged to do that, they’re typically smaller vendors. In this case, with Jazz, what we’ve done is coined the term “Open Commercial”. Meaning we’re engaging the general public to help develop it but we will commercialize it.
And so two years ago, we started the Jazz Project and we’ve had over 14,000 people contributing to date. And as we’ve moved forward, the community has basically said, we’re ready for Version 1, and that’s exactly where we are and what we’re announcing here 11 new products of -- partially from IBM, partially from our partners that are based on the Jazz technology. Now, one of the premier products in this offering is Rational Team Concert. So this product is specifically focused on helping teams effectively collaborate in realtime.
Now, this might be difficult to answer, but what main problem does this then help address for a company.
No, that’s actually a great question, Peter. In the end of the day, software development and delivering software that really operates and runs your business is very much a collaborative effort. And if you think about the scope of the collaboration that has to happen to deliver the right software to organizations, it’s very broad.
Now, Rational has a history of delivering software to help the development teamwork more effectively together; it’s very important. But the scope is broader than that. If you think about what software delivery really is all about, it’s about automating business processes, trying to streamline companies approach to the competitive stance, being more nimble, to be able to change over time, and be able to acquire and divest different parts of their company, be able to change with technology.
All of these different aspects of business really require that collaboration happens with the line of business people, the marketing people, possibly the legal people, and definitely the technology folks in IT to make these things happen. So Rational Team Concert is all about providing that realtime collaboration. Rational Team Concert is what we call “Team Aware”, meaning as you create, for example, a set of requirements, these requirements then, of course, get passed into the IT side of the house to understand what it is you need to be built, or need to be acquired to fulfill that business set of requirements.
Well, as IT looks at those requirements, they may have some questions. Well, which business analyst actually developed those? Possibly the business analyst could be in Hong Kong, or could be in India, or could be down the street.
It’s hard to tell in this ever-flattening world as globalization is happening in our economy. And so Rational Team Concert provides this team aware approach to all of the artifacts that go into delivering this software all the way down to individual’s coders understanding which line of code has defects, all the way up to I’m looking at a set of requirements where some business models. And I don’t understand it, I need to I can then right click right inside of Team Concert and understand who developed it.
I can then open an instant messaging window, or a link to a wiki, or start a wiki, and I can actually use Web 2.0 type approach of social networking to find the right person that I need to collaborate with, start collaborating with, capture that collaboration for later use, and allow it to streamline and flow through the organization. Another key element of Rational Team Concert that helps address this is the process and workflow aspect, right.
So you can imagine that in every organization there’s some form of process. The business analyst does some modeling and hands it off to a system analyst, or and then it hands off to an architect, or down to developers, or some flow like that, right. Well, Rational Team Concert allows you to automate that flow and so it automatically creates a workflow based on the workflow in your organization.
And then helps you make it come to life and support that workflow in the organization. And then third, Rational Team Concert then allows you to look over the entire process project end-to-end and analyze how that project’s coming, or if you’re CTO, you want to know how all your projects are coming. It allows you to get realtime metrics into those projects. All of this is really around the challenges of globalization, the challenges of becoming more nimble at delivery the right software for the right challenge that the companies are facing today.
This seems like this is addressing the issue of a flattening world, you know, where I’m in New York and you are wherever you are, say you're in Hong Kong, and if we needed to work together for a couple for days, right.
That’s exactly right as different team members come and go because we acquire companies, and divest companies, as well as people moving project to project. Being able to understand what it is I’m trying to work on, and who I hand it off to, and automating that workflow, and getting the collaboration established so that I know who to talk to, to get things worked out is all about what Jazz is bringing to market here.
So what do you see for the future of this software collaboration?
With regard to the future, Peter, that’s a great question because in all we see is several different key transformations happening around this Jazz technology. One transformation is how teams work more effectively together, right. So as more and more of the Rational set of tools integrate with the Jazz technology, as well as other third parties companies take advantage of the Jazz technology, and the Jazz platform, we’ll see how development teams and software delivery teams really can work more effectively and more predictably together, right.
So we see a transformation in the organization how software development is done. Second, is an industry transformation. Now a good analogy here is the ECLIPSE world. So as I’m sure you’re familiar, before ECLIPSE, there were many different software development tools that did all sorts of great things but they did not have a common interface, they did not have a common underpinning to allow them to work more effectively together, the tools themselves.
In other words, ECLISPE has helped consolidate the desktop around a common UI, a common set of underpinnings so that these tools could work together even though they’re from disparate different vendors; that has transformed that desktop. Jazz is going to do the same thing. We already see that happening.
Jazz is going to do it from the sever side, if you will, the collaboration side of the equation. So in this announcement, not only did IBM release some new products, but we also have quite a few partners that have -- are releasing products on Jazz as well as having announced further support and new projects for themselves coming out on Jazz.
And if we compare how ECLIPSE has progressed over time as compared to where we are with Jazz, kind of looking at the same point in time, we’re actually further ahead in ECLIPSE in terms of starting to transform the industry around this collaborative platform. And that’s also why we made is open commercial. Right, so that we would have industry wide support for this common underpinnings because it really is the next key thing that needs to happen for our industry.
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