Well, hello everybody. Here we are in Austin, Texas at the TeleLogic Users Conference, Innovation 2008, and we've got another exciting special guest with us, actually a returning guest to RedMonk TV. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yes, my name is Neera Chandra. I am responsible for Worldwide Strategy for Rational across the whole band. And as further background, you're obviously from the TeleLogic family. Yes, I came from TeleLogic, where I was responsible for the product strategy and the corporate strategy. And since you've been part of TeleLogic for a while, I'm curious how this year's conference sort of compares against previous ones. So this year's conference actually, from a very personal viewpoint, has far exceeded my expectation, because given the economic climate, you know, there are tremendous amount of restrictions on travel. Right. And according to that, Austin is not really your holiday destination. Right. It doesn't have the same draw that maybe Las Vegas would or something like that. That's correct. Absolutely. So, the people who have come here have genuinely found value in a way where they can go back and justify it to their own corporations. So, against that context today, we have the highest number of attendees is close to, I think, between 540 or 550. Right. And to me, that's the proof point of the value we provide and the continued loyalty of our customers. What's the future of the user group conference? Like, is it going to be merged into RISDUC or RSDC, I should say, or how is it going to show up next year? No, what we decided to do is we co-locate these conferences, because there is a very strong focus on the systems market which RISDUC traditionally has. We want to maintain that and by co-locating the two user conference, we provide an opportunity for the customer base of RISDUC to actually gain access to the value of the larger RISDEC.
2:03Right, right. So, we would be able to maintain the focus and be able to then build on that to show in a very concrete way what the value IBM's acquisition brings to the technology base. Right, right. To sort of have those existing communities sort of crossbreed and mingle with each other as a word. Exactly right, in a very concrete way. So, yesterday, you gave part of the keynote, if I recall, and a lot of, as you would expect, from a company that's been acquired by another company, or merged with, or however you want to characterize it, a lot of the discussion was about the sort of mingling and co-evolution of those two companies. And I'm curious if, you know, not that I want to make you launch into the whole keynote, but I'm curious, you know, since last time we talked, I guess, at RSDC '08, back in the sort of late summer, you know, like, what's been sort of the co-evolution and the mixing together of the rational and the telelogic products together? That's pretty much the background of my keynote. The keynote was focused on two things. Right. One, to effectively and convincingly communicate to the audience that the consistency and the momentum of the plans and the messages and the strategies we've laid out will continue post-acquisition. It kind of addresses the unknown question of, well, what will happen post-acquisition. Right, right. So I wanted to make sure that we delivered that convincingly. And the way we did that was to actually lay out in fair amount of detail the joint product roadmap going forward. And within that structure, I shared with them as to how this joint product roadmap evolved and give them anecdotal evidence of the cultural compatibility and the common view which evolved. And then I added to that areas where we could bring more value in a very short timeframe due to the fact of the acquisition. So it was not only reassured but also built on that reassurance to introduce to them the excitement of IBM.
4:08What does it mean? What does it concretely bring to you? Which was not available under telelogic. The message seems to have been extremely well received from the feedback I've had with the customers because we went out for a barbecue late evening. So I talked to a number of different customers. And it was consistently positive. When we were talking right before starting to film here, you were saying how there are people who sort of like based large parts of their careers on telelogic software. And I was thinking analogously, if Adobe suddenly phased out Photoshop, there would be a lot of concern, right? That's right. And for those people who don't, I always find that concept fascinating about sort of being very dependent in a positive way on your tools. And I wonder, looking in the telelogic brand, what are some of those tools that people are like they need it for their career to do their job? Like what are they depending on in the portfolio? Exactly as you picked up, you know, the loyalty of the customers is driven by very stark personal interests. Right. People have literally bet their career when they chose one product over the other. And therefore, there is a natural tendency to say, given the uncertainty, tell me very precisely what you're going to do. Right. So we told them precisely what we will do. And not only that, that's why for the first time in my keynote, I actually had two demos as a part of the keynote. Right, right. So one was telelogic team web top, which is a proof point of what we said in Atlanta we will do. And within a year, here was the product, proving beyond a value of doubt that the momentum will continue. So the consistency and the continuity is very important value to our customer. Then the second demo I showed was rational requirement composer, which is the proof point of, okay, now that we understand that, you know, do no harm you've established, but what about do more good?
6:16So the rational requirement composer was a proof point of saying here's the value, which we bring in very concrete way, here and now, as a result of the acquisition. So it kind of, that's the structure of the message. And judging from the feedback so far, people really understood it in that context. But diving down into those two things a little bit, the web top and the, I don't know, Rick, I don't know what- Rational requirement composer. Right, right, it's like RRC, right? RRC, that's right. And, uh, I- Think about composer, the S-O-N. Right, right, right. Composer. There you go. And so, I mean, what, what did the demo show? I mean, what did those tools do, I guess, is the real question. The logic team web top is a proof point of how we will leverage the jazz integration architecture. Oh, okay, right. Which essentially is a flexible architecture based on the internet standards using RESTful APIs, which enables you to draw relevant data or information from different tools and present it in a composite manner where the data turns into insight. Right. So, for example, you may be able to draw use cases from a modeling tool. You'll be able to draw the data about the tasks which are assigned to different people in the context of that architecture or use case. And you'll also be able to draw, for instance, data from requirements. So, now you can have a composite view of here's my requirements, here is who's working on it, and this is the artifact of evolution of that design. That seems to sort of be one manifestation of one of the general jazz principles, if you will. Absolutely. Of sort of pulling together from a bunch of disparate information sources into, as you were saying, a composite or a view that's tailored towards whatever sort of, not necessarily a person, but the task at hand that you're worrying about, instead of having to visit all those different consoles, if you will. Exactly. That's one of the driving principle in context collaboration.
8:17And the beauty of this is that it solves a very long-standing problem of the data which is generated by the tools is owned by the tools. Right. Right. So, in order to have access to that data, in order to be able to collaborate on that data, traditionally you'll need multiple tools. And that itself is its own challenges, right? The cost, the training, the knowledge. What Team WebTalk does, building on the jazz integration architecture, liberates data from these tools while they are still owned by them, but enables you to collaborate. So, it makes data a first-class citizen of collaboration. Right, right. That's powerful. A lot of the mash-up composite sort of stuff, it seems to get down to giving the rest of the world the sort of magic that you have in Excel, where you sort of, like you're saying, the data is the primary citizen. That's correct. And everything is built around getting what you want out of the data, not sort of having the application guide you through what you should want to do. And it ties into our overall message that in this difficult economic climate, it is our duty to make sure that we provide solutions that give you increasing return from your investments. Right, right. So, you've already bought the tools, you've already put in many years of effort to generate intellectual capital, and now you can get increased return by being able to pull the right data in the right context and present it to the right person. Going off that sort of thread that runs through the discussion that you had, these troubling economic times, as people like to say, how does sort of the rational requirements composer sort of fit on that same thing? The rational requirements composer actually extends the user base or the stakeholders who can contribute to the requirements, because so far in requirements management tools, you had to have an engineering background. They were very formal tools to be able to interact or contribute or review. With the requirement composer, you can now bring in the wider community of business analysts, line of business users, business architects, who can write the requirements in their own natural way.
10:24So, the requirement composer offers a variety of techniques and tools to be able to explain in a capturable way the needs or the requirements of the customer. Ah, right. For instance, it has a storyboard capability. You can actually sketch in storyboard. Right. It can give you a UI design. You can say, look, one of the examples we showed was here is a CD company. Right. And one of the stakeholders actually sketched out what the CD cover should look like. And the other sketched out what the web page should look like. So, now you can look at the consistency and all these requirements. Right. You can then tie back to if you're developing a website. I guess to use an old dichotomy from the 90s, it's sort of like the difference between the church and the bazaar, right? Yes. And it's sort of like a very, or ivory tower to use another favorite metaphor. Instead of having the specialized role that's in charge of perfectly drawing out what the CD cover looks like. That's correct. You take it to the masses, if you will, the bazaar, and you allow them to have a role in expressing what they want. Even if they're not trained and specialized and therefore expensive enough to perfectly tell you what they want. That's correct. So, you not only capture that intellectual property, you're able to seamlessly integrate it with the back end of formal requirements leading into development. Now, you have got development brought up front into the bazaar or the community of developers. Right. So, you bring your requirements closer to the reality of the marketplace. Yeah, yeah. And, of course, associated as things change quickly, you're able to reflect that change very, very rapidly all the way. And, of course, the end result is you're able to produce the product which matches the needs of the requirement in a very, very close way. I'm also curious, you know, how that division between the technologists and the businessists, I guess, to make up a word, has long been sort of like the bane of sort of using technology for business. And it seems like, in addition to having tools that help out, there's some sort of more sort of cultural changes that have been happening that sort of, you know, make it possible for those two sides to talk with each other.
12:35And I wonder, in the, you know, the worldwide role that you have, as it were, like, what those changes have been that you've been seeing? I mean, how have people's minds been changing such that it's possible to give them a tool? It's largely driven by the fact that, you know, no more can you have technology for technology's sake. Right. It's very necessary that you try, you tie the technology investments very closely with the business objectives you want to drive. So there is no difference now possible to have a gap between the business side and the technology side. It's sort of that inefficiency has been driven out by necessity, it seems like. That's the economic necessity. Right. And then the other vector is technology. I mean, today, the technology has become so easy to use that it is possible for non-engineers… To understand it. …to perform and, you know, and as the younger generations come on, they are already very, very, very computer savvy. So for them, you know, to generate match-ups, you know, people who've been on the Facebook. Right. So, increasingly, the vector of technology as an enablement and the economic necessity of driving towards that, I think will accelerate this. So, I mean, we sort of like laid out a lot of sort of high-level ways things are going and sort of aligning business and software and things like that. But getting down to the actual tools that Rational has and TeleLogic has, like how are the, what's sort of like the joint roadmap between those two things to bring those tools together to sort of actualize that happy world we were just saying? That was essentially the meat of the keynote. Right. Where I wanted to make sure that we went down into specifics at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, but specific enough so that there was a very clear information as to what will happen to each segment or family of tools. So we started sharing with our users and our customers the strategic direction which drove the overall joint product roadmap evolution.
14:46And therefore, we talked about how we will focus on developing family of products specializing in their own domain. Right. Despite having similar capabilities. And it's important because, you know, when you go to an audience such as one of the user group, both Rational and TeleLogic had products which had similar capabilities. Right. So if you go and say, look, we're going to continue both products, you need to show them the business logic why this will be so going on in future. And that's why we started sharing with them the reality of how we arrived at this. So we looked at both the products and said, what do they actually do? And can we live with only one product? Right. Because that makes sense, right? That's why people achieve it. And what we realized that while there were similar capabilities, their core market was different. And hence what we decided to do as a result of this insight is to focus strategically our resources on the core market, the anchor markets and defocus from the areas of overlap. Right, right. So for example, if you look at requirements, we have doors on one side and we had requisite pro on the other. Now doors typically is focused on those projects which are large, complex, require multiple levels of traceability, have a high level of need for formality. Typically in a regulatory or compliant rich environment. Whereas RecPros core market is traditionally a more classical IT project where there is less need for rigor. Right. So there is more reliance on writing the requirements in a lot of office kind of tools. You know, Word and PowerPoint and so on and so forth. Where the formality as you see is not the driving force.
16:46Where the traceability doesn't have to be at that market level of decomposition. So we decided therefore to say, okay, we are going to focus on our resources on driving those into more systems and complex IT market domains. And we will focus and drive RecPro on the more classical IT kind of project. And then we will take advantage of the common platform of Jazz so that we are able to save the resources which otherwise would be spent in duplication of back end. Right, that makes sense. So that is a classic example of reuse. Everybody talks about reuse but I want you to communicate very clearly what do we mean by reuse and how we will take advantage of it. So that way we will be able to meet the economic necessity of maintaining two products which grow profitably and will continue to evolve in meeting the needs of very specified market audiences. And are there other things on the roadmap that are going along that line or is that the one that has been fleshed out the most at the moment? No, no, that was just an illustration of one example I wanted to give you concrete and spare you the whole, you know. Sure. So there were multiple examples and the other area was modeling. Right. Where we will bring conversions of different modeling products leveraging a common modeling platform based on Eclipse and common components from Jazz. Right. So that's another area we are going to do that. The third area is in configuration and change management. Right. I'm curious about the change management one in specific because that's, in the IT management world that's something that's, you know, an interesting topic nowadays is doing change management stuff. And I'm curious in the more rational world, the sort of software development side of the house, like what are the, what are those two areas in change management that the Telelogic brand and the traditional? Right. So change was an interesting area where we could show the power of conversions utilizing the Jazz platform. Right. So when the two teams got together, I think within, within an hour or so, they quickly worked out that we would leverage going forward a common core of change built on the Jazz platform and then be able to provide a front end to save the investment in customization on both the Telelogic change.
19:06Right. As well as ClearQuest. Right. Okay. So that's an example of how the two come together and continue. And there's, there's a constant theme with all this of, of using Jazz as sort of the platform underneath a lot of, a lot of things, which is, which has been interesting to see it evolve from a, more of an IDE, like developer centric thing to being like a generalized platform for all of the stuff that Rational does. Right. And, and that's why we wanted to introduce the concept of Jazz and the promise and the excitement in a very concrete way. Right. Because this audience is, as we talked about, very emotionally connected and they've bet their careers. So to give them a view of a distant future, which is a little bit airy fairy does not appeal to them. So I tend to talk to them in very concrete terms and provide a proof point. And that's the way our relationship has evolved. Well, great. Well, thanks for taking this time to talk for this. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.