Here we are at RSDC 2008 in Orlando, Florida and we've got a special guest with us. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Scott Hebner and I'm the Vice President of Marketing and Strategy at Rational. So can you give us a quick rundown of what the announcements were at RSDC this year? Yeah. So, the focus has been for several years on how to support these globally integrated environments that our customers find themselves in where they have software assets and skills that span all these different locations, all these different organizational elements, and then of course they start outsourcing, you have packaged apps in there. As customers begin to focus more and more on the strategic investment they make in software and drive more value performance of that software as they move through time, these are assets that never go away, software never seems to go away, it's always living and evolving, the defining factor I think becomes the breakdown of all these organizational boundaries, the geographic boundaries, the boundaries that get created because infrastructures and tools don't work well together. That was sort of the origin of the jazz technology initiative that we announced in 2006, talked about strategy, 2007 is really about the technology and the community and getting thousands and thousands of people involved in helping us develop the technology and make sure it does what it needs to do. We decided towards the end of last year that it's ready for prime time, it's meeting with the customers and the people that are participating want, so we started building real products on it. So at this event we announced about 20 products that will be enabled to the jazz technology platform that will be available this year, 9 of which are IBM and including some brand new products to our portfolio, some are existing products that are being enabled to jazz. Right. And then of course there's about, I think there's about 11 business partners that have made announcements, like for example, Mainsoft, enabling the SharePoint portal and Microsoft Office and Lotus Quicker. So there's by-synchronous integration of all those apps. Right. It seems with Team Concert that you guys are essentially building what you might call a platform or a hub, to use a shorter word, for sort of the management of the full life cycle of software.
2:00And the things you're talking about is the ability to sort of plug in or also reach out to other tools, like whether you're reaching out to an IDE that someone's actually using the code or reaching out to something or also, you know, plugging in and feeding in the platform of this information. Right. It's one of those deals that, you know, history repeats itself and you learn. Right. Because if you go back to, I mean, just go back to, I kind of, I grew up in the WebSphere world at IBM. Yeah. So I go back to the mid-1990s and as we, you know, headed towards the end of that time period, you know, we had these transaction servers and, you know, we had MQ Series, if you remember, for point-to-point integration of applications and very brittle, right? Point-to-point-to-point-to-point, you know, you start to get to a point where there's just too many connections and, by the way, you're connecting them together, not the customer. Yeah. You're doing it on behalf of the customer and you never seem to really get it the way they want it. And also this internet thing came about and it became clear that the technology, that there needed to be a transformational technology to do transactions and integration more effectively or the network. And thus, things like Java 2EE, right? Right. They began the charge of those open standards and we shipped WebSphere, AppServer and then, you know, I think, what IBM has contributed to the world of e-business around WebSphere and Java 2EE. You know, it's been a saving world piece or anything like that, but it's a big step forward for our customers. I get the sense that this is very similar in scope because, you know, again, I think if you look at it from how to get all these organizations working together, and when we say organizations, by the way, it's not just development organizations. It's operations, it's the security analysts, it's the lawyers, and they all need to have visibility into these projects and in context of how they work and what they need to know, right? And to collaborate and so forth. The point-to-point integration within an application lifecycle management platform was going to have the same brittle results as trying to do it, you know. So again, all of a sudden we have this very rich web architecture that has the protocols of how you interact and how you exchange information, semantics of how you do that. So we figured, you know, let's build. It's time for a transformational platform that we can then, you know, take everything we have forward through adapters, a hub as you said.
4:01I mean, it is a real, it's almost like an enterprise services bus. Right. Except it's optimized for lifecycle management and getting all these people working together. So let's build new products based on this new platform but connect all the existing ones and evolve them. And over time, we'll start to connect into this hub in a very incremental way and, you know, hopefully it'll have the same impact for ALM that Java 2EE had just for broader internet transactions. Right. And then you have sort of standards efforts around that because, I mean, that was a large part of the success of the Java world was, you know, independent or open standards or whatever, proprietary ones. Right. So what we learned in our experience over last year with the jaz.net community was that we need to focus on the protocols that take advantage of the web architecture, right? Right. And perhaps work in an across industry manner with whoever else wants to get involved to define these protocols but keep them implementation independent. Jazz is our implementation of these protocols. So what we announced this week is this new initiative called Open Services for Collaborative Life Cycle. The point of it is to do exactly that. Right. Let's not say that if you want to do this that you must adopt the jazz implementation. But let's come together in the marketplace and define a set of protocols on how these things work together. And by the way, we'll be willing to provide an open reference implementation of those protocols. Now whether other companies, say, TeleLogic, we just acquired, or HP, or Microsoft, whoever may also want to apply, whether they want to design their own protocols, implementation of those protocols, I should say, or whether they want to use the open reference implementations, it's really up to them. But let's separate that decision from the whole stack of the infrastructure that implements the ALM capability. I think customers are going to have a choice out there. And partners, you can either build into the jazz infrastructure, or you can work on a different implementation. And if we can all agree through the web architecture to have these protocols, then customers ultimately get to piece together these organizations, these geographically distributed teams. Right. So there is an open standards element to this. And then there's, of course, our implementation. And it is very similar to the Java 2 EE community process back then.
6:04Yeah, it's a handy analogy to make to a past success. It's the best of that, and I think it's also the best of the experience of five years ago with Eclipse. Right. Same situation. Oh, we had all these tools. The individual wasn't productive because the tools didn't work together. They couldn't share data. You know, point-to-point integration, all those tools, wasn't going to work. So we need a transformational platform, thus Eclipse was born. Right. No one could plug into it. Five years later, we have, what, 3,000 products out there of all kinds of tools that are built on it. And that was a true open source, the whole implementation that people build upon. Right. As you know, the Java 2E community process was a little bit different, right? It had standards but then had a more proprietary, if you will, kind of implementation of it. And I think what we've done is we've kind of taken the learnings of both those and we've applied it to how we're trying to do the jazz.net. So being a hub or being at the center of something and for all of the stuff you were just talking about, it seems like moving the jazz stuff or whatever, team concert, whatever you might want to call it, to more of an on-demand or a SaaS model would be pretty handy or a feature for someone. And so I wonder, and you know, what we've seen over the past few years, a lot of it is online, if you will, or SaaS or whatever you want to call it. And I wonder, like, what, I mean, how the thinking that you're going through to sort of figure out what would be something that could just be, you know, like, you know, rational.ibm.com, everyone logs into that to use their stuff and what would be on-premise? It's actually the next level of deep thinking that our distinguished engineers are, you know, Martin Nowley is our chief technical officer and he has a team of people that are beginning to think through that because you're right, these open protocols on the web around ALM, right, and the jazz implementation for us provide the ability, once we get that established, to do that much more effectively. It's kind of hard to take existing tools like Clearcase. Right. Step one is to get that platform out there, get it hardened, and I think you've kind of referenced before, it is an open hub. Web, you know, in Web 2.0 interfaces, you can do Eclipse interfaces. We're going to have Visual Studio interfaces. You know, we have partners building SharePoint and Quicker and it goes on and on and on.
8:05So you can, you know, plug things into this thing. So you get all this connectivity and all this collaboration and, you know, the automation of all the traceability and the connections of the artifacts. Because it's inherently built on the architecture of the web, it sets up a perfect environment that you can do software as a service. Right. We acquired a company last year called WatchFire. Mm-hmm. It does application security, scanning and compliance scanning. And they have a software as a service offering. So many customers don't buy the tool. They just say, "Hey, scan my website once a month, let me know if I have any vulnerabilities." Right. And so we're learning how that's working, which, by the way, is very good. And I think as we go through time, as this Jazz platform becomes the underpinnings, it gives us now a real opportunity to start really thinking in a concrete way how do we provide a complement of licensed offerings that customers buy versus subscription offerings or whatever. Exactly. It's hard to do in a productive way that was really going to have the flexibility that the customer wanted on products that weren't designed to do that. Yeah, absolutely. And that's why, again, I keep going back to Java 2EE as one example. You know, Eclipse was a second one. You know, you get to a point every once in a while in this industry that there's a need for a transformational. Right, right, right. Underline, you know, a new carburetor for the car, right? Yeah. And, you know, again, I think what we learned is that those don't happen if it's just you. Yeah. It has to be open. It has to have all these, you know, open protocols because as soon as you make it all about you, then you're not going to have everyone connecting to it. Yeah. And by definition, it doesn't mean to. It's hard to integrate with yourself, right? You still have a couple business partners. Right. You know, it's just hard to do. And that's why we're hopeful that these protocol services that we wanted to find that we're going to get, you know, you know, really this is a proposed set of protocols. We're going to be reaching out to a lot of the ALM providers in the marketplace, many of which, if not all of which, are competitors, and say, look, just like we've done several times in this industry before, let's get together, let's define the protocols, and we'll make a commitment that we'll adapt our Jazz implementation to those protocols. Well, that sounds great. Well, thanks for taking so much time to talk to us. You bet. Anytime. Thank you.