1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:06,880 Here we are at RSDC 2008 in Orlando, Florida and we've got a special guest with us. 2 00:00:06,880 --> 00:00:07,880 Would you like to introduce yourself? 3 00:00:07,880 --> 00:00:08,880 Sure. 4 00:00:08,880 --> 00:00:11,480 I'm Scott Hebner and I'm the Vice President of Marketing and Strategy at Rational. 5 00:00:11,480 --> 00:00:15,560 So can you give us a quick rundown of what the announcements were at RSDC this year? 6 00:00:15,560 --> 00:00:16,560 Yeah. 7 00:00:16,560 --> 00:00:22,480 So, the focus has been for several years on how to support these globally integrated environments 8 00:00:22,480 --> 00:00:27,960 that our customers find themselves in where they have software assets and skills that 9 00:00:27,960 --> 00:00:32,480 span all these different locations, all these different organizational elements, and then 10 00:00:32,480 --> 00:00:35,640 of course they start outsourcing, you have packaged apps in there. 11 00:00:35,640 --> 00:00:39,620 As customers begin to focus more and more on the strategic investment they make in software 12 00:00:39,620 --> 00:00:44,220 and drive more value performance of that software as they move through time, these are assets 13 00:00:44,220 --> 00:00:49,140 that never go away, software never seems to go away, it's always living and evolving, the 14 00:00:49,140 --> 00:00:53,920 defining factor I think becomes the breakdown of all these organizational boundaries, the 15 00:00:53,920 --> 00:00:57,600 geographic boundaries, the boundaries that get created because infrastructures and tools 16 00:00:57,600 --> 00:00:58,600 don't work well together. 17 00:00:58,600 --> 00:01:03,560 That was sort of the origin of the jazz technology initiative that we announced in 2006, talked 18 00:01:03,560 --> 00:01:09,560 about strategy, 2007 is really about the technology and the community and getting thousands and 19 00:01:09,560 --> 00:01:13,540 thousands of people involved in helping us develop the technology and make sure it does 20 00:01:13,540 --> 00:01:14,540 what it needs to do. 21 00:01:14,540 --> 00:01:18,540 We decided towards the end of last year that it's ready for prime time, it's meeting with 22 00:01:18,540 --> 00:01:22,040 the customers and the people that are participating want, so we started building real products 23 00:01:22,040 --> 00:01:23,040 on it. 24 00:01:23,040 --> 00:01:27,540 So at this event we announced about 20 products that will be enabled to the jazz technology 25 00:01:27,540 --> 00:01:32,960 platform that will be available this year, 9 of which are IBM and including some brand 26 00:01:32,960 --> 00:01:36,040 new products to our portfolio, some are existing products that are being enabled to jazz. 27 00:01:36,040 --> 00:01:37,040 Right. 28 00:01:37,040 --> 00:01:40,960 And then of course there's about, I think there's about 11 business partners that have made announcements, 29 00:01:40,960 --> 00:01:46,960 like for example, Mainsoft, enabling the SharePoint portal and Microsoft Office and Lotus Quicker. 30 00:01:46,960 --> 00:01:49,960 So there's by-synchronous integration of all those apps. 31 00:01:49,960 --> 00:01:50,960 Right. 32 00:01:50,960 --> 00:01:54,960 It seems with Team Concert that you guys are essentially building what you might call a platform 33 00:01:54,960 --> 00:02:00,960 or a hub, to use a shorter word, for sort of the management of the full life cycle of software. 34 00:02:00,960 --> 00:02:04,960 And the things you're talking about is the ability to sort of plug in or also reach out 35 00:02:04,960 --> 00:02:07,960 to other tools, like whether you're reaching out to an IDE that someone's actually using 36 00:02:07,960 --> 00:02:12,960 the code or reaching out to something or also, you know, plugging in and feeding in the platform 37 00:02:12,960 --> 00:02:13,960 of this information. 38 00:02:13,960 --> 00:02:14,960 Right. 39 00:02:14,960 --> 00:02:15,960 It's one of those deals that, you know, history repeats itself and you learn. 40 00:02:15,960 --> 00:02:16,960 Right. 41 00:02:16,960 --> 00:02:19,960 Because if you go back to, I mean, just go back to, I kind of, I grew up in the WebSphere 42 00:02:19,960 --> 00:02:20,960 world at IBM. 43 00:02:20,960 --> 00:02:21,960 Yeah. 44 00:02:21,960 --> 00:02:25,960 So I go back to the mid-1990s and as we, you know, headed towards the end of that time 45 00:02:25,960 --> 00:02:30,960 period, you know, we had these transaction servers and, you know, we had MQ Series, if 46 00:02:30,960 --> 00:02:33,960 you remember, for point-to-point integration of applications and very brittle, right? 47 00:02:33,960 --> 00:02:36,960 Point-to-point-to-point-to-point, you know, you start to get to a point where there's just 48 00:02:36,960 --> 00:02:41,960 too many connections and, by the way, you're connecting them together, not the customer. 49 00:02:41,960 --> 00:02:42,960 Yeah. 50 00:02:42,960 --> 00:02:44,960 You're doing it on behalf of the customer and you never seem to really get it the way 51 00:02:44,960 --> 00:02:45,960 they want it. 52 00:02:45,960 --> 00:02:50,960 And also this internet thing came about and it became clear that the technology, that there 53 00:02:50,960 --> 00:02:54,960 needed to be a transformational technology to do transactions and integration more effectively 54 00:02:54,960 --> 00:02:55,960 or the network. 55 00:02:55,960 --> 00:02:57,960 And thus, things like Java 2EE, right? 56 00:02:57,960 --> 00:02:58,960 Right. 57 00:02:58,960 --> 00:03:03,960 They began the charge of those open standards and we shipped WebSphere, AppServer and then, 58 00:03:03,960 --> 00:03:07,960 you know, I think, what IBM has contributed to the world of e-business around WebSphere 59 00:03:07,960 --> 00:03:08,960 and Java 2EE. 60 00:03:08,960 --> 00:03:13,960 You know, it's been a saving world piece or anything like that, but it's a big step forward 61 00:03:13,960 --> 00:03:14,960 for our customers. 62 00:03:14,960 --> 00:03:19,960 I get the sense that this is very similar in scope because, you know, again, I think if 63 00:03:19,960 --> 00:03:22,960 you look at it from how to get all these organizations working together, and when we say 64 00:03:22,960 --> 00:03:25,960 organizations, by the way, it's not just development organizations. 65 00:03:25,960 --> 00:03:29,960 It's operations, it's the security analysts, it's the lawyers, and they all need to have 66 00:03:29,960 --> 00:03:34,960 visibility into these projects and in context of how they work and what they need to know, 67 00:03:34,960 --> 00:03:35,960 right? 68 00:03:35,960 --> 00:03:36,960 And to collaborate and so forth. 69 00:03:36,960 --> 00:03:40,960 The point-to-point integration within an application lifecycle management platform was going to 70 00:03:40,960 --> 00:03:44,960 have the same brittle results as trying to do it, you know. 71 00:03:44,960 --> 00:03:48,960 So again, all of a sudden we have this very rich web architecture that has the protocols 72 00:03:48,960 --> 00:03:53,960 of how you interact and how you exchange information, semantics of how you do that. 73 00:03:53,960 --> 00:03:55,960 So we figured, you know, let's build. 74 00:03:55,960 --> 00:03:59,960 It's time for a transformational platform that we can then, you know, take everything we have 75 00:03:59,960 --> 00:04:01,960 forward through adapters, a hub as you said. 76 00:04:01,960 --> 00:04:04,960 I mean, it is a real, it's almost like an enterprise services bus. 77 00:04:04,960 --> 00:04:05,960 Right. 78 00:04:05,960 --> 00:04:08,960 Except it's optimized for lifecycle management and getting all these people working together. 79 00:04:08,960 --> 00:04:12,960 So let's build new products based on this new platform but connect all the existing ones 80 00:04:12,960 --> 00:04:13,960 and evolve them. 81 00:04:13,960 --> 00:04:18,960 And over time, we'll start to connect into this hub in a very incremental way and, you know, 82 00:04:18,960 --> 00:04:23,960 hopefully it'll have the same impact for ALM that Java 2EE had just for broader internet 83 00:04:23,960 --> 00:04:24,960 transactions. 84 00:04:24,960 --> 00:04:25,960 Right. 85 00:04:25,960 --> 00:04:28,960 And then you have sort of standards efforts around that because, I mean, that was a large 86 00:04:28,960 --> 00:04:33,960 part of the success of the Java world was, you know, independent or open standards or whatever, 87 00:04:33,960 --> 00:04:34,960 proprietary ones. 88 00:04:34,960 --> 00:04:35,960 Right. 89 00:04:35,960 --> 00:04:39,960 So what we learned in our experience over last year with the jaz.net community was that we 90 00:04:39,960 --> 00:04:44,960 need to focus on the protocols that take advantage of the web architecture, right? 91 00:04:44,960 --> 00:04:45,960 Right. 92 00:04:45,960 --> 00:04:50,960 And perhaps work in an across industry manner with whoever else wants to get involved to define 93 00:04:50,960 --> 00:04:53,960 these protocols but keep them implementation independent. 94 00:04:53,960 --> 00:04:56,960 Jazz is our implementation of these protocols. 95 00:04:56,960 --> 00:05:00,960 So what we announced this week is this new initiative called Open Services for Collaborative 96 00:05:00,960 --> 00:05:01,960 Life Cycle. 97 00:05:01,960 --> 00:05:02,960 The point of it is to do exactly that. 98 00:05:02,960 --> 00:05:03,960 Right. 99 00:05:03,960 --> 00:05:08,960 Let's not say that if you want to do this that you must adopt the jazz implementation. 100 00:05:08,960 --> 00:05:12,960 But let's come together in the marketplace and define a set of protocols on how these things 101 00:05:12,960 --> 00:05:13,960 work together. 102 00:05:13,960 --> 00:05:18,960 And by the way, we'll be willing to provide an open reference implementation of those protocols. 103 00:05:18,960 --> 00:05:25,960 Now whether other companies, say, TeleLogic, we just acquired, or HP, or Microsoft, whoever 104 00:05:25,960 --> 00:05:30,960 may also want to apply, whether they want to design their own protocols, implementation of 105 00:05:30,960 --> 00:05:34,960 those protocols, I should say, or whether they want to use the open reference implementations, 106 00:05:34,960 --> 00:05:35,960 it's really up to them. 107 00:05:35,960 --> 00:05:40,960 But let's separate that decision from the whole stack of the infrastructure that implements 108 00:05:40,960 --> 00:05:41,960 the ALM capability. 109 00:05:41,960 --> 00:05:43,960 I think customers are going to have a choice out there. 110 00:05:43,960 --> 00:05:47,960 And partners, you can either build into the jazz infrastructure, or you can work on a different 111 00:05:47,960 --> 00:05:48,960 implementation. 112 00:05:48,960 --> 00:05:52,960 And if we can all agree through the web architecture to have these protocols, then customers ultimately 113 00:05:52,960 --> 00:05:56,960 get to piece together these organizations, these geographically distributed teams. 114 00:05:56,960 --> 00:05:57,960 Right. 115 00:05:57,960 --> 00:05:58,960 So there is an open standards element to this. 116 00:05:58,960 --> 00:06:00,960 And then there's, of course, our implementation. 117 00:06:00,960 --> 00:06:04,960 And it is very similar to the Java 2 EE community process back then. 118 00:06:04,960 --> 00:06:07,960 Yeah, it's a handy analogy to make to a past success. 119 00:06:07,960 --> 00:06:13,960 It's the best of that, and I think it's also the best of the experience of five years ago 120 00:06:13,960 --> 00:06:14,960 with Eclipse. 121 00:06:14,960 --> 00:06:15,960 Right. 122 00:06:15,960 --> 00:06:16,960 Same situation. 123 00:06:16,960 --> 00:06:17,960 Oh, we had all these tools. 124 00:06:17,960 --> 00:06:19,960 The individual wasn't productive because the tools didn't work together. 125 00:06:19,960 --> 00:06:20,960 They couldn't share data. 126 00:06:20,960 --> 00:06:24,960 You know, point-to-point integration, all those tools, wasn't going to work. 127 00:06:24,960 --> 00:06:26,960 So we need a transformational platform, thus Eclipse was born. 128 00:06:26,960 --> 00:06:27,960 Right. 129 00:06:27,960 --> 00:06:28,960 No one could plug into it. 130 00:06:28,960 --> 00:06:32,960 Five years later, we have, what, 3,000 products out there of all kinds of tools that are built 131 00:06:32,960 --> 00:06:33,960 on it. 132 00:06:33,960 --> 00:06:37,960 And that was a true open source, the whole implementation that people build upon. 133 00:06:37,960 --> 00:06:38,960 Right. 134 00:06:38,960 --> 00:06:41,960 As you know, the Java 2E community process was a little bit different, right? 135 00:06:41,960 --> 00:06:46,960 It had standards but then had a more proprietary, if you will, kind of implementation of it. 136 00:06:46,960 --> 00:06:50,960 And I think what we've done is we've kind of taken the learnings of both those and we've 137 00:06:50,960 --> 00:06:52,960 applied it to how we're trying to do the jazz.net. 138 00:06:52,960 --> 00:06:56,960 So being a hub or being at the center of something and for all of the stuff you were just talking 139 00:06:56,960 --> 00:07:01,960 about, it seems like moving the jazz stuff or whatever, team concert, whatever you might 140 00:07:01,960 --> 00:07:07,960 want to call it, to more of an on-demand or a SaaS model would be pretty handy or a feature 141 00:07:07,960 --> 00:07:08,960 for someone. 142 00:07:08,960 --> 00:07:12,960 And so I wonder, and you know, what we've seen over the past few years, a lot of it is online, 143 00:07:12,960 --> 00:07:15,960 if you will, or SaaS or whatever you want to call it. 144 00:07:15,960 --> 00:07:18,960 And I wonder, like, what, I mean, how the thinking that you're going through to sort of 145 00:07:18,960 --> 00:07:23,960 figure out what would be something that could just be, you know, like, you know, rational.ibm.com, 146 00:07:23,960 --> 00:07:26,960 everyone logs into that to use their stuff and what would be on-premise? 147 00:07:26,960 --> 00:07:31,960 It's actually the next level of deep thinking that our distinguished engineers are, you know, 148 00:07:31,960 --> 00:07:35,960 Martin Nowley is our chief technical officer and he has a team of people that are beginning 149 00:07:35,960 --> 00:07:39,960 to think through that because you're right, these open protocols on the web around ALM, 150 00:07:39,960 --> 00:07:44,960 right, and the jazz implementation for us provide the ability, once we get that established, 151 00:07:44,960 --> 00:07:46,960 to do that much more effectively. 152 00:07:46,960 --> 00:07:49,960 It's kind of hard to take existing tools like Clearcase. 153 00:07:49,960 --> 00:07:50,960 Right. 154 00:07:50,960 --> 00:07:53,960 Step one is to get that platform out there, get it hardened, and I think you've kind of 155 00:07:53,960 --> 00:07:55,960 referenced before, it is an open hub. 156 00:07:55,960 --> 00:07:59,960 Web, you know, in Web 2.0 interfaces, you can do Eclipse interfaces. 157 00:07:59,960 --> 00:08:01,960 We're going to have Visual Studio interfaces. 158 00:08:01,960 --> 00:08:05,960 You know, we have partners building SharePoint and Quicker and it goes on and on and on. 159 00:08:05,960 --> 00:08:07,960 So you can, you know, plug things into this thing. 160 00:08:07,960 --> 00:08:12,960 So you get all this connectivity and all this collaboration and, you know, the automation of all the traceability 161 00:08:12,960 --> 00:08:14,960 and the connections of the artifacts. 162 00:08:14,960 --> 00:08:18,960 Because it's inherently built on the architecture of the web, it sets up a perfect environment 163 00:08:18,960 --> 00:08:20,960 that you can do software as a service. 164 00:08:20,960 --> 00:08:21,960 Right. 165 00:08:21,960 --> 00:08:22,960 We acquired a company last year called WatchFire. 166 00:08:22,960 --> 00:08:23,960 Mm-hmm. 167 00:08:23,960 --> 00:08:26,960 It does application security, scanning and compliance scanning. 168 00:08:26,960 --> 00:08:29,960 And they have a software as a service offering. 169 00:08:29,960 --> 00:08:30,960 So many customers don't buy the tool. 170 00:08:30,960 --> 00:08:34,960 They just say, "Hey, scan my website once a month, let me know if I have any vulnerabilities." 171 00:08:34,960 --> 00:08:35,960 Right. 172 00:08:35,960 --> 00:08:38,960 And so we're learning how that's working, which, by the way, is very good. 173 00:08:38,960 --> 00:08:43,960 And I think as we go through time, as this Jazz platform becomes the underpinnings, it gives 174 00:08:43,960 --> 00:08:49,960 us now a real opportunity to start really thinking in a concrete way how do we provide a complement 175 00:08:49,960 --> 00:08:54,960 of licensed offerings that customers buy versus subscription offerings or whatever. 176 00:08:54,960 --> 00:08:55,960 Exactly. 177 00:08:55,960 --> 00:08:58,960 It's hard to do in a productive way that was really going to have the flexibility that the 178 00:08:58,960 --> 00:09:01,960 customer wanted on products that weren't designed to do that. 179 00:09:01,960 --> 00:09:02,960 Yeah, absolutely. 180 00:09:02,960 --> 00:09:05,960 And that's why, again, I keep going back to Java 2EE as one example. 181 00:09:05,960 --> 00:09:07,960 You know, Eclipse was a second one. 182 00:09:07,960 --> 00:09:10,960 You know, you get to a point every once in a while in this industry that there's a need 183 00:09:10,960 --> 00:09:11,960 for a transformational. 184 00:09:11,960 --> 00:09:12,960 Right, right, right. 185 00:09:12,960 --> 00:09:15,960 Underline, you know, a new carburetor for the car, right? 186 00:09:15,960 --> 00:09:16,960 Yeah. 187 00:09:16,960 --> 00:09:20,960 And, you know, again, I think what we learned is that those don't happen if it's just you. 188 00:09:20,960 --> 00:09:21,960 Yeah. 189 00:09:21,960 --> 00:09:22,960 It has to be open. 190 00:09:22,960 --> 00:09:25,960 It has to have all these, you know, open protocols because as soon as you make it all 191 00:09:25,960 --> 00:09:28,960 about you, then you're not going to have everyone connecting to it. 192 00:09:28,960 --> 00:09:29,960 Yeah. 193 00:09:29,960 --> 00:09:30,960 And by definition, it doesn't mean to. 194 00:09:30,960 --> 00:09:32,960 It's hard to integrate with yourself, right? 195 00:09:32,960 --> 00:09:34,960 You still have a couple business partners. 196 00:09:34,960 --> 00:09:35,960 Right. 197 00:09:35,960 --> 00:09:36,960 You know, it's just hard to do. 198 00:09:36,960 --> 00:09:39,960 And that's why we're hopeful that these protocol services that we wanted to find that we're 199 00:09:39,960 --> 00:09:44,960 going to get, you know, you know, really this is a proposed set of protocols. 200 00:09:44,960 --> 00:09:49,960 We're going to be reaching out to a lot of the ALM providers in the marketplace, many 201 00:09:49,960 --> 00:09:53,960 of which, if not all of which, are competitors, and say, look, just like we've done several 202 00:09:53,960 --> 00:09:57,960 times in this industry before, let's get together, let's define the protocols, and we'll 203 00:09:57,960 --> 00:10:00,960 make a commitment that we'll adapt our Jazz implementation to those protocols. 204 00:10:00,960 --> 00:10:01,960 Well, that sounds great. 205 00:10:01,960 --> 00:10:02,960 Well, thanks for taking so much time to talk to us. 206 00:10:02,960 --> 00:10:03,960 You bet. 207 00:10:03,960 --> 00:10:04,960 Anytime. 208 00:10:04,960 --> 00:10:04,960 Thank you.