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Well, hello everybody. Here we are at RSC 2009, the Rational Software Conference in

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lovely Orlando, California. And we actually have a returning guest for Redmonk TV.

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Would you like to introduce yourself?

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Sure. My name's Mike O'Rourke. I'm the Vice President of Development for Rational,

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so I own all the traditional Rational products, the jazz-based products, telelogic products.

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One of the areas, thinking about sort of comparing this year's announcements to last

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year, it seems like there's a lot more emphasis on, I guess, as an old developer, what I would

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call sort of dashboards and metrics and reporting and things like that.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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And I wonder if you can talk about sort of what you guys have in the portfolio now and sort

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of what people, you know, your customers would be using those tools for.

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Right. Well, I think you're exactly right. There's certainly that theme is here. And the

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reasons for it are pretty simple. We're seeing more and more people in the same situation that

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IBM and other people are in, right? Which is cutting back and really needing to understand

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as they cut back, what are the impacts of that? You know, how do I better measure, understand

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where I am so I can make smarter decisions as I move forward?

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We've done a lot of work, both internally as we kind of transform our organization to a more

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agile, at scale level organization, as well as just using our own product suite and trying to,

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we'll drink our own champagne, to try to create a better level of best practices,

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metrics, and capabilities that people can use to really start to look across the life cycle.

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Right. So I think really all of our products and many, many other products out there, you

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know, have very nice, concise metrics for the change that they're doing or the defect or the

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test.

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They're sort of tracking activities. They're tracking the activity that works in that tool,

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but not across the life cycle. So one of the things that we've tried to do with our insight product,

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a new product for us that was just released yesterday, is to try to fill in those information

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gaps. And so be able to, for instance, say, I've got a requirement, which developers worked on this

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requirement? Did they check it into this build? Does it have a set of tests associated with it? And did it

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pass those tests? Right. So I can get a report that shows me that information on a requirement-by-requirement

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basis that allows me to get access to the information across the life cycle, not having to manually try to

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piece it together.

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And like sitting through some of the keynotes and overviews for these things, one thing I've been

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curious about is the, I guess there's a couple of ways you can split up what you were just talking

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about. And one of them is obviously tracking metrics and seeing, you know, seeing if things

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are going well or poorly.

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Exactly. And then the other thing that seems sort of implicit in what you're talking about is sort of a

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collection of, I mean, everyone's always trying to avoid the term best practices, but sort of

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practices that are best for whatever context you may have. And then it seems like the other side of the

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thing is sort of the tooling that supports all of that. And then of course, sort of the consulting that

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helps out with that. And so with that, with all that on the table, I'm sort of curious how the practices

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are sort of like supported by the tools. Because I would assume at some point people have to sit

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down, whoever the stakeholders are, and sort of say like, here's the metrics that we're going to be

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tracking and here's the best practices. So what's, how do we finally get to the state where the tool

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can tell us how well or poorly we're doing?

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So obviously Rational's always been a big proponent of processes, right? RUP and Unified Change

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Management and all these kinds of things are processes that we've promoted and talked about.

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But, but one of the things that I think we see changing is, is that companies can't necessarily

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swallow all of those at one time. And so we've broken those processes up into what we call practices

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that help you towards iterative, help you towards waterfall, help you towards agile, whatever it

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might be. And then there's a set of measurements that we, we have come to through all of our, you know,

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installations working amongst ourselves and trying to roll this out to the 30,000 developers

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and software group that says, okay, if you're trying to do, let's just take, you know, an iterative

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development team. Well, you should probably be measuring velocity.

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Right.

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You should be measuring burndown rates. You should be measuring build health. You should be measuring, you know,

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10, 15 metrics. And those metrics come out of the tools, right? That we, we have. And then the connection

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between those two in terms of the different repositories of information is done through Jazz. Right. And so what that starts to allow you to do then is take those

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best practices, if you will, and you can change those and the weighting of what those things might

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be. But let's just take something like project health. At my level, I've got 50 products. I need to have a way that in real time I can see the project health. I can see how far along a project is on their schedule, how much money I'm spending on that project and the overall project health, which might include support data, critical situations, defects. It might include hedging

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headcount data. Am I staffing this to the level I committed to? It might include how's my velocity here versus other teams, et cetera, et cetera. Right. But I just want to see red, yellow or green. Right. Right.

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If it's red, if it's red, then I'm going to make a phone call or I'm going to drill down. If it's green, then I'm not going to worry about it today. So a couple of things there. One is what we found is that we were spending a lot of time, like most companies do, trying to piece together the information as opposed to having the information flow itself.

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Right. So certainly that's where jazz comes in. And then that's where these best practices also came in. So when I start to say, okay, I need to do project health for my iterative team, there's actually 11 different metrics that flow from a variety of different tools that help with some out-of-the-box capabilities.

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that says, okay, it's 10%, this, 15% of this, 5% of this rolled up into red, yellow, or green.

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So that's the way we see it happening.

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Do we think that there's only one way to do it?

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No, but we do think that if you can start to, out of the box, get Project Health for

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an iterative project with 11 different metrics that flow up into it, you may take one out,

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you may change one, you may change the weightings, but chances are it's not going to be too far

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off from what you think Project Health should be, or Build Health, or something that is very

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subjective in general, and you try to make it as quantifiable as you can so that you can

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make decisions based upon that.

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It sounds like rather than sort of subscribing, if you will, to one sort of methodology, the

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idea is that nowadays, that you guys have sort of a library, if you will, metaphorically,

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you have things that you can pick and choose from, which I guess is sort of classic RUP process.

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That's exactly right.

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That's exactly right.

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A lot of the folks that were behind the RUP process in our organization have kind of taken

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that to the next level and created something called MCIF, the Measure Capability Improvement

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Framework.

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And what it is, is those selectable processes and practices, along with these metrics that come

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out of the box in our products, and along with some assessment tools, so you can either self-assess

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or the tools can help you assess where you are in your journey to become more agile, more

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iterative, better quality, better on time, whatever it might be.

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And so this is where the new Insight tool comes into play.

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It gives you those red lights and green lights, and then has that information so that you

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as a decision maker, so to speak, when you want to investigate something, you can get more

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information and drill down as people want to say.

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That's exactly right.

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It comes out of the box with essentially the ability to immediately get information from

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Microsoft Project and Excel, as well as a variety of rational tools and other tools.

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Where I think the real value is, is the fact that it then takes that information with these

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MCIF reports and metrics and best practices to your point, and gives you a starting point to

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start to say, you know, how am I doing today, and how am I going to do tomorrow, and start

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trending it, you know, analyzing it, and then, you know, being able to then start improving on it.

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Are these sort of traditional, you just get a server provision and run the Insight product

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on it, or what is this, what do these products end up looking like?

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So the Insight product is based off Cognos, which IBM bought, and essentially what happens is you

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install it with, and it comes out of the box with these adapters. Essentially, adapter is a way that

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we get a certain set of information and we kind of grow to be smart about that information as we

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adapt to it. And so we've got to adapt-

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It has that dual meaning to it.

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That's right, that's right. And so it comes out of the box with that information, and to

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your point, it is installed on a database and on a server. It is Cognos, so it's a mission

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critical kind of, you know, business intelligence tool. But where the fine tuning comes in is these

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best practices that are out of the box, specifically home for the development team,

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the testing team, the requirements for product management team, to better collaborate and work

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together. And then for their management, to start really understanding what's happening in the

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development teams, right? Because so often what happens is the development teams are looking at

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velocity and build health and things like that, and the executive could care less about that. It's,

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"Am I going to make it to market, and how much money am I spending?" And you have to flow that

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information up to something they care about so that they're not beating you up for the wrong reasons,

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right? And rewarding you for the right ones. That's right. And then I guess every now and

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then switching those two. That's right. That's exactly right. I remember last time we talked last

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year, we spent a little bit of time sort of defining the types of customers that you got,

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that Rational tends to deploy into. And I wonder, with things like Insight and the MCIF and other

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sort of tracking that we're talking about. I mean, what's your sense for the range of scale or sort

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of like the scale that these things go into? I think for that kind of tool, the more projects,

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the bigger your organization, the more distributed it is, the better. But really, if you think about

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it, even a single project may have a testing tool, a build tool, a configuration management tool,

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a change tool, a requirements tool from different vendors. And they're spending time trying to pull

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together this information. So they will definitely get value from it. But obviously,

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the more value you're going to get is the more projects you see and the more aggregated that data

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can get. And do you have a sense for, is there sort of like a floor? Like if you're only five people,

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it may not be worth your effort or? Well, I think it's, from an effort perspective,

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I think it would be worth it. It may be cost prohibitive. Right, right.

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I guess that's maybe a different wallet effort, if you will.

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That's right. So switching topics a little bit. Also, over the past year, you guys have been,

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I guess, you know, integrating in the TeleLogic acquisition, which is a, from traditional rational

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development, a different type of development, systems development, as people like to say. And I

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wonder, having overseen that, like how that process has been going for the past year and how

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the different products have sort of shaken out in the portfolio. I mean, is there, has there been some

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deduplication going on and some merging together of things or how's that been working out?

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There's definitely, there's, there's been very little duplication. There's certainly areas where

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they're, they have a similar type of functionality. So maybe it's an SCM functionality with something

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like ClearCase and, and Synergy or requirements management with something like Doors and Requisite Pro.

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But really what we saw before and since is, is that the customer type you are defines the kind of

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functionality that you want. So let's just take the Doors and, and Requisite Pro example.

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Many customers need to not only have, you know, let's say you're building a car, you're building an

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airplane or a, or a spaceship. You know, when, as you're trying to build those things, your requirements

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are, are key, right? You have to fulfill those requirements. Those requirements change. And so

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really ironclad tracking, traceability, heavy, heavy process capabilities have to be built into your

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requirements management. And so Doors is really, is required. That level of capability is required.

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But if you have something that's a little bit more lightweight, maybe a little bit more agile,

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you're using stories and, and storyboards and Visio or something else to do that work,

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then something like Requisite Pro or Requisite Requirements Composer can do the job that you need

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to get done at a different price point. But also it's, it doesn't, you know, burden you with some of the

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extra capabilities and bells and whistles that, that's something like a door.

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It doesn't impose all the discipline that you might actually want.

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That's right.

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So the, the teams have been off, uh, be honest with you working very, very well together. I'm very

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happy with the way they're working together. Now, the common goal for the telelogic teams and the

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rational teams is that everything becomes jazz based over time. Um, so for instance, we've got products

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like Build Forge, uh, and RAM, um, uh, and a new requirements tool coming out on jazz this, later

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this year, as well as a project management tool. Um, but we've got, for instance, doors coming out,

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uh, on top of jazz next year. Um, and so the, the goal is, is to try to have all the products,

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if you will, integrate through that, that jazz infrastructure so that they can get the

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collaborative life cycle benefits, the tying together, the integration and allow

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tools like insight to then feed all that information up to, to me or to you.

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Right. Well, the, the last thing I wanted to ask you about, again, since you oversee the

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actual sort of development of this, I mean, the, uh, you know, I, I guess since, since last year,

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I mean, the, the idea of cloud computing has really heated up and people are very interested

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in doing that. And I wonder, I mean, you guys have, um, I think they're, they're called technical

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previews or trials or something of, of some rational products that are being offered through

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jazz.net or, you know, in the cloud, if you will, as a service. And I wonder if,

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you know, having overseen the, the development of that stuff, if there's like some advice,

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you can give people who are considering deploying to the cloud themselves. I mean,

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how do you take the sort of packaged on premise applications and move them to a sort of cloud

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world? How, how has that worked out for you guys?

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You know, it's interesting because I think IBM, like many companies is kind of figuring their,

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this out as we go. Um, we're going to certainly focus on what we would call the, the private cloud

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first. So, uh, a cloud, if you will, within your organization or hosted by another organization,

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but not open to the public, if you will. Um, and for that, you know, as long as you've got some

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pretty well behaved server based applications, um, getting to the clouds, not as big of a step as you

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might think. There are issues that people in the cloud tend to want to solve with licensing. So

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things like either term licensing or token based licensing where you can use whatever product

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and it's, you're only getting, if you will charge when you use it, not just because you happen to

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have licenses of it. Right. So there's things like that, that we're adding to our products that,

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um, and be quite honest with you, we, we haven't found many issues as we've gotten there,

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but we're sort of, so we're certainly learning a lot as we and all these other companies start to

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move towards taking these technical previews to betas later, later on this year. And then

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uh, you know, globally making it ready for early next year to be as far as having previews,

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what a lot of companies wanting to deploy to the cloud do is, is, I mean, it's, it's nice that

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they're, they're kind of honest with, with their sort of beta users or the customers. And they just

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like, well, we need to test this out and not only see if it works, so to speak, but kind of see

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if there's different scenarios that we, you would want to use for this. You know, to some degree,

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it's kind of like, um, the agile model where you're trying to get stakeholder feedback. Right.

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I think that's really what we're trying to do within IBM and rational with our cloud offerings is,

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is that we think we've put together something that makes sense. It's very easy to use and provision,

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um, you know, makes a lot of sense, but there's going to be things that we don't know until our

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customers tell us that. Um, and we've been doing actually a lot of, uh, the work on our cloud,

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uh, quite interestingly in our China lab. And the reason for that is, is that, um, the,

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the Chinese government has actually sponsored a number of what they call software parks. And these

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software parks can have up to a hundred thousand people in them. And what these software

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parks want to do is centrally manage this, these private clouds. You come in with your

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10 people and say, okay, I want to have this product, this product, and this product.

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All right.

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You plug into the wall and it's just there. Right. And you're basically paying me, it's kind of like

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hooking up to cable, right? You're paying me $24.95 a month for the, for that service. And I've got

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a hundred thousand people I can go do that with. And so we've actually been doing a lot of work with

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some of those software parks, um, using them, if you will, as guinea pigs for us. And at the same

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time, taking their feedback and upgrading this. And we've been doing that now for about six months.

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Yeah. That's interesting. It sounds like you get a pretty varied amount of interesting feedback.

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Yeah.

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There's different scenarios there. Yeah.

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Well, great. Well, thanks for taking all this time to talk with us. It was nice.

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- Nice. - Thank you.

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- Appreciate it.