Hello everybody, here we are in Austin, Texas at the 2008 Teleglogic User Group Innovation 2000. Would you like to introduce yourself? Of course. My name is Dominic Tafesli. I'm currently with Teleglogic for the next week or so, where I'm the Vice President of Product Marketing, and I'll be joining the IBM Rational Team as Program Director for Systems Marketing. One of the things we were talking about before we were filming is this idea of a software delivery platform. Yeah. That you guys have been working on, and I wonder if you can tell me what that is to start out with. Today, when we actually look at, say, systems, when I say systems, I'm talking about any of the intelligence that goes in everyday appliances, we're talking about a car or a plane. Software running inside something other than a computer, essentially. And all of that software is really today, actually, if you look at, say, the iPhone. Right. It's all software. It's all about the software that goes in. The fact that, actually, phones is probably just the detail today. But then, it's the same for, you know, if you're going on a plane, it's all about the entertainment system that you get. And if you're buying a car, it's, well, does it have this, does it have that, does it have that? It means that the relative importance of the software for any of those systems means that today, for consumers, it's extremely important. That means that for the business, it's critical. I mean, that's their competitive edge. That's what's going to make customers buy their systems. Right. The software is where the real differentiating value, and also just purely the value is in a lot of things. Yeah. It's the value. It's the innovation. This is the part that's really changing every day, all new features being added and changing the world around us. I was reading an article about plans we have inside IBM for systems to actually water your
2:04lawn, which are going to be connected to satellites that will tell you, well, is it going to rain sooner or not? They actually need to water your lawn. So, I mean, that's just an idea of how intelligent all these systems are getting. What is it? Delivery platform stuff that you guys are talking about. Is that sort of like a backbone for doing this through systems or how does that play into things? It's really all about, as you say, a complete backbone. Right. The software delivery platform that's going to enable these teams to actually produce this innovation. How do they actually add features faster? How do they improve quality? How do they get their products out faster? Sure. For instance, if I pick just a couple of examples, for instance, today the whole world is trying to go green. Right. And they're going green through by becoming a smarter planet. But the systems become smarter. Which means that you need to actually be able to innovate. You need to be able to add new daring features into your software and into your systems. So you need to be able to bring together global teams who could be anywhere across the world and find them in because otherwise that's not very green actually if we fly through meetings. Sure. There's a certain dreaded irony in that scenario, right? At the same time, also, the software part is actually closely linked with the business part. Right. Because we are software no longer can be just developed on its own. It has to be developed, aligned to those business objectives. Whether they're going green or whatever else. Sure. Your corporate direction. Sounds like the way you're describing it is that software has become an important part of almost any system, if you will, to use that term again, that you're going to be selling. And that's sort of relative to other things in the industry, if you will, a recent phenomena. Right? And figuring out how those companies can...essentially getting those companies to be software writers
4:08is sort of the challenge at hand, right? And giving them the help, whether it's tools and process, to know how to do their software just as well as they might build the physical phone that they're delivering on or the plane or things like that. You really have to take away...they need to be focusing just on that innovation. Right. We don't want them to have value where their brain power is best put at use. We don't want them worrying about how extra work do I need to do to get the reporting right. Yeah, yeah. Or to make sure I pass my audit because I do have to trace to these corporate regulations. Right. We don't want them to spend brain power on that. The platform has to take care of all that. All the collaboration, all the automation, all the reporting that goes on behind the scenes. That's what the platforms can be provided. Do you sort of fix those problems primarily with sort of tools that you introduce or other practices? Like, what's that process look like for someone who's realized that, you know, holy crap, we need to do software. But I have all this other stuff, this baggage, if you will, that comes with software. Like, and if they come to you guys, like, how do you help them out to avoid all that baggage, to neatly file it away, as it were? There's multiple levels. So, the first basic level is that we have this platform that we're building on top of the Jazz platform. Right. Which is something that, Telogic coming into IBM, IBM brings that to us. This scalable, completely integrated, consistent platform that's going to enable the growth of that platform. Right. Into which we're slowly, we're working on how we can actually build in our tools that they plug into that Jazz vision. That's really the tool part where we're very lucky because actually Telogic and Rational together do provide the best tools around, whether we're talking about market share leaders or award-winning products, it really is a fantastic portfolio. Right. The opportunity to actually bring them all together is great. If we have that layer, then we can work on what we call green threads, which is to take
6:11a step back and say, we don't want just to say, well, oh, cool. We have a product with an API and a product with an API. Let's connect them. Right, right. You know, you laugh, but a lot of companies do that. Sure, sure. What we're really trying to do is say, well, let's take a step back and say, okay, Sam, in the automotive industry, what's the workflow? You know, how do, how would teams actually work together? What would each stakeholder need to see? Right. How would the information flow? And from there define what the integrations we need are. I think that's interesting because it does get at something that someone like myself, being from the software, I guess, in this context, the classical software side, we sort of assume there's one process for writing software. Yeah. But, you know, sort of what you're hinting at is that maybe in the auto industry there's a process that's a little different than what you might have in the, you know, the aerospace industry that's different than the handset industry. Yeah. The regulations are different. Right. The standards are different. The platforms they build for are different. Their constraints are different. The automotive industry is going to be trying, they'll have a lot of variance. You know, each car is going to be different. Right. So they're going to want to have small footprint software, but reusing components that you might not have if you're building a plane. The number of models of planes that are coming out aren't as... Aren't as varied, definitely not. But on the other hand, in the aerospace industry, you're going to have very, very strict rules because, I mean, it's extremely safety critical. Sure. You don't want a blue screen of death on the pilots. Right, right. Yeah. And then when you take it down to, for instance, consumer electronics. Right. DVD players, for instance. It's a lot less about, you know, safety and sort of regulations and more about the innovation and new features and time to market and being the first to get these fantastic things. Going back a long way, Rational itself has always been good about having sort of a generalized
8:15practice, if you will, for creating software that you sort of whittle down into sort of the methodology that you want. And then it seemed like there's an adoption of agile software development within Rational and so forth and so on. And what we've just been talking about is sort of an introduction of a whole new pack of sort of vertical methodologies. We were talking several times about building on top of the JAS platform. And it feels to me, and correct me if you're wrong, but it feels to me like there's sort of the general shared principles of doing software and services, but there's a lot of additional things that the TeleLogic sort of family is bringing in as far as the methodologies. And so, with that gigantic layup to it, how do you anticipate that Rational will deliver those different verticals? I mean, is it a different product that you have, or do you sort of specialize different products, or how does that manifest itself? Our teams have been working together. Rational had processes like the Rational Unified Process. Right, right. TeleLogic had similar initiatives that we call Harmony. So Harmony for software development, Harmony for systems engineering, for instance, different variants. Right. So those teams are today working together so that they can provide what I call integrated process guidance packages. Okay, right. That will be, you'll be able to tune, adapt to your own needs, and then generate a website that's going to explain to each of your stakeholders, or each of your users inside your company, well, this is how we develop inside our company. Right. This is what you should be doing. Reinforcing a consistent process across the organization, but also making sure that you are doing things the right way so that we can extract meaningful metrics from that. Right, right. The first step towards a new process is telling people about it. And it's even tougher than that because you have to tell them, but it has to be sustainable training. Right. Because your process is going to change if you're going to try to be agile and adapt and learn
10:16from your previous experiences. So that process is going to adapt as you go along. So how do I actually make sure that all these developers out there who might be in China, who might be in India, who might be in the US, in the UK, how do I make sure that they are up to speed on what the latest process is without having to bring them in all in the training room every week for a couple of hours? Right, right. And provide systems where you can then implement a website that not only gives you the information on the process, but also the tool mentors. So you can actually go in and say, okay, so with my tool that I have, for instance, DOORS, how would I do requirements management? So you'll click there and it says, so to do that, this is exactly what you do. They're sort of, I mean, just taking if we have Acme company, you know, example XYZ company, they sort of devise their software development process and that gets explained, like you were saying, in a document that's everywhere. And then, well, a document is an overloaded term, in a library, if you will, of how it is. And then there's also the mapping of the different tools that you would have, whether they're DOORS or a rational tool or whatever, of how that maps into the process that you have. So you actually get an idea of, like, what you should be doing. But also we've got a large number of companies who are coming to software for the first time. For instance, if you're working on baggage delivery systems. Twenty years ago, that would just be a conveyor belt taking luggage rounds in airports. Now it's all driven by software. So that whenever a plane's late, it automatically says, well, store all that luggage in somewhere special, with special tags, and bring them out onto the right plane whenever that's needed. So that means there's a large number of organizations that today are coming to software and saying, well, I have a clean slate. Help me. Oh, right. What can we do? What are today's best practices? And how can I actually, you know, quickly catch up and become one of the big players?
12:16Right. The third trend is also what I call the Facebook generation. The Web 2.0 generation. Lots of new developers who've grown up in a world of Web 2.0 and Facebook and YouTube and World of Warcraft. And they have completely different expectations when it comes to usability, to communication, to collaboration. We don't want to say, no, you have to work the same way as we've been working for 20 years. Right. We really want to leverage that inventiveness and creativity because the ideas are coming from that. If you look at our platform today, we're going to have multiple products, for instance, products that are extremely well suited for, say, for instance, configuration management. Right. In a more traditional fashion for industries like the aerospace industry, where you do need to follow clearly defined ways of working. But also offerings like a rational team concert, which are really completely rethought to embrace the principles of those new up and coming teams who know that today, well, we actually need the software delivery platform that meets today's needs, today's challenges, and today's users. It's to telelogic strength doing systems, software for systems and things like that. I mean, we've spent this whole time talking about the software component of it. And I wonder if there's any sort of like short or medium or long, whatever, the temporal time, if there's any sort of plans to get in sort of to the rest of those systems, as far as whether it's the actual hardware involved or things like that. I mean, is it, do you see that you'll sort of stick in the software area or what do you expand to other parts of it? Right now, we're really looking at expanding on our strengths, which are around the software development or software delivery platform parts, plus also the modeling area, which we're extremely strong.
14:19And that moves a bit higher up into the systems engineering part, where you'd be modeling not only the software, but also some of the other areas. The more complete product, if you will, whatever it may be. We know that today, we don't want to, we're not a PLM vendor in the sense of, let's say, a PDM tool vendor. So we'll be working with the key players in the industry, the dissolves and so on. But we still are working very hard on the glue that brings all those teams together. For instance, integrated product change management. A change request might come in on your complete system and maybe impacts the software, but maybe it also impacts the electronics, maybe it impacts the mechanical parts. How do you actually ensure that you're coordinating all those teams with communication, with impact analysis? And if you're looking at systems, the big problems you get are once you actually get to the end and say, well, okay, let's bring everyone together now. And then find out that, okay, this, the software is aligned with, you know, changes that say version 5, but the hardware is still on version 2, and they don't plug together. We really are working on moving away from those silos and putting together a co-engineering initiative so that we have complete visibility, traceability and coordination across the world. Well, great. Well, thanks for taking all this time to talk to us. No problem.