IBM offers better insight into development projects

By David Rubinstein

June 1, 2009 —

With the idea of providing business intelligence for the application development life cycle, IBM today announced Rational Insight, a data warehousing, analysis and reporting engine built for software development management at its Rational Software Conference in Orlando.

The company also rolled out the first parts of a cloud strategy designed to help IBM customers create and manage their own private clouds for software development.

The Rational Insight product is built on IBM’s Jazz collaboration technology and the Cognos business intelligence platform to provide metrics on such things as defect densities, development trends over time, task completion vs. requirements, and more, said Rational CTO Martin Nally. “There are a large number of standard analyses and reports tailored to the governance and management of software development,” he said.

In conjunction with the release, IBM is releasing to beta Focal Point for Project Management, an extension of the Telelogic tool that was used to “triage” new feature requests, and it now offers the kinds of measurements that can be applied to an overall project, Nally said. “Other project management tools are disconnected from the development process,” he claimed.

“Project managers walk around on Monday saying, ‘This is what we want,’ then they walk around again on Friday to find out, ‘This is what we did,’ and then a lot of time is spend manually reconciling those.

“In Insight, users can do planning based on actual work items, because it’s more tightly linked into the functioning of the development team,” he said.

Other Rational tools that round out the Insight offering are Team Concert, Requirements Composer and System Architect. Insight is also linked to IBM’s Measured Capability Improvement Framework, which Nally called “IBM’s guide to how to be successful in process improvement.”

IBM soars to the clouds
IBM also announced at the Rational conference initiatives to provide tools on the cloud, as well as tools for the cloud, Nally said.

The cloud offers IBM a new way to deliver—and for customers to deploy—Rational’s tools. Among cloud services IBM is delivering now are basic cloud services, such as registering a virtual machine, starting it, getting images onto it and the like, Nally explained.

The cloud provides for more flexible use of hardware as well as server monitoring and management, which is what IBM’s customers have been asking for, he said. He added that they also want more flexibility in licensing. Although not ready to announce new licensing terms yet, Nally did say the company was working on a plan akin to what Telelogic offered in its term licenses. “Customers want to be able to consume licenses for a set period, like the duration of a project,” Nally said.

IBM is focusing on private clouds established on a company’s premises. It is not, Nally said, competing with Amazon EC2.

“You can expect to see Rational’s use of the cloud, focused on software, as part of a larger picture,” Nally said, pointing out that IBM Global Services is working with the Rational division to help customers exploit development services in the context of a private cloud.

“People like the benefits of the cloud,” he said. “But they want to know, ‘What’s the incremental step to get me from where I am now, without taking on a degree of change that’s impossible to manage or control?' "

At JavaOne, IBM made even more cloud-focused announcements around its WebSphere platform. Craig Hayman, vice president of WebSphere for IBM's software group, introduced WebSphere CloudBurst, a US$45,000 appliance designed to provision WebSphere servers on demand.

WebSphere CloudBurst, said Hayman, brings cloud-style dynamic provisioning of virtual machines to the WebSphere ecosystem. “I've got a set of machines that are running some virtualization software, and I would like to run that as my own private cloud. I would like to dispense virtual images into that environment as freely as I can," he said.

"WebSphere CloudBurst is an appliance. Plug it into the wall, go into it and configure it like you would configure your router, point it at the machines that are running some virtualization software. The second step is to load it up with the virtual machine images for your WebSphere applications.”

Thus, CloudBurst can provision empty servers to act as WebSphere application hosts on demand. The CloudBurst appliance's pricing is based on the number of WebSphere instances hosted, and it includes software for slimming those images down to operating system bare essentials. This is IBM's first virtual machine repository, though it is, as yet, only targeted at WebSphere provisioning.

Hayman did, however, say that the technology was not strictly limited to WebSphere. “There's nothing preventing it from doing other things. Out of the box, it's pre-configured for WebSphere.”

Alex Handy contributed to this story.

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, IBM, Rational

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