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IBM alphaWorks Reaches A Public Milestone


Company has floated project trial balloons on site for 10 years

By Alex Handy
November 1, 2006 — 
It’s been 10 years since IBM launched its alphaWorks project, an unprecedented initiative to foster collaboration among the company’s far-flung technology researchers. But alphaWorks, from the beginning, went far beyond closed-door teamwork among IBM’s developers. It also encompassed customers, providing them with early insight into new projects, as well as access to sample code, binaries and documents.

In all that time, the site has hosted more than 700 projects and emerging tech demos.

Bearing in mind that nearly all alphaWorks projects were akin to alpha-level products—that is, not ready for prime time like those on IBM’s developerWorks site—the portal is a success. As the project reaches the decade mark, the site now hosts the first round of IBM’s potential software-as-a-service offerings, under the alphaWorks Services name.

Marc Goubert is the manager of IBM’s alphaWorks. He’s been there since 1997, when the project was up and running. “I think that [alphaWorks] can be seen as both a benefit of change that is happening at IBM, as well as an instigator for that change,” Goubert said. He cited the fact that IBM’s first foray into offering its code to the open-source community came from an alphaWorks project, and that the practice has since spread throughout the company.

Goubert started by working on the underlying infrastructure of alphaWorks. That Web site has again been worked over for its 10th anniversary, and has added new projects, such as Deep Thunder, a customizable weather forecasting service that offers a data stream of up-to-the-minute weather patterns so businesses can plan for events that might hurt sales, service or delivery.

But not every alphaWorks project is business-ready. Goubert said that the wackiest thing to come out of the site was called Robocode.

“It was a project made by an IBMer in his spare time. He created this project that would allow a novice programmer to create, through Java interfaces, a robot that would battle with other robots in an online arena,” said Goubert.

Other projects at alphaWorks have laid the cornerstones of entire infrastructures. “I think a great example is the XML parser,” said Goubert. “It was originally done by the team in Tokyo in 1997 and 1998. Back then, people didn’t quite know how to deal with XML. The parser for Java actually launched at the same time the XML spec was approved by the W3C. We came out with not only the first parser, but it adhered to the standards completely. We eventually open-sourced it and donated it to Apache, where it’s now known as Xerces.”

BREAKING WITH CONVENTION
During a time when the conventional wisdom was to hide all research and development from prying eyes, alphaWorks broke the mold. “The idea hasn’t been [that] we take our intellectual property and hold onto it and make sure nobody steals our ideas,” said Goubert. “The side effect solves the problem of how do we take that tech and ensure that other IBMers around the world know about this and add their own input? The approach that IBM has taken with alphaWorks—to open up our technology in the labs—has increased the quality and the efficiency of our products by allowing that collaboration to come back to us.”


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