Q&A: Rational exec explains app life-cycle management focus

Computerworld - Lee Nackman, vice president of product development at Rational Software Corp., sat down with Computerworld to discuss the company's increasing focus on application life-cycle management and the IBM unit's future plans to more tightly link its development tools with IBM's Tivoli Software product line.
What is driving Rational's focus on application life-cycle management, and how will you continue to tailor the product line to support this philosophy? Customers are saying they have to spend money on IT. IT is not just about saving money, but it is about bringing business value from IT. Life-cycle management allows them to ensure what they are spending in IT is really bringing value to the business. We help them manage a portfolio of products, decide what requirements are needed, build models of applications, produce the code to make sure the requirements are met and get the applications deployed into operations.
In development, you'd like to be able to simulate a production environment so you can establish whether service-level agreements will be met. We are working with Tivoli to be able to model the deployment environment. You can give that model to the application architect to design deployment into the application. The Rational Unified Process is a set of best practices around various types of development activities. Tivoli is defining the IBM Tivoli Unified Process around the deployment activities. We are bringing the two pieces together.
What type of demand are you getting from your users for tools to support service-oriented architectures? There is a tremendous amount of interest in SOA among our customers. We have a tremendous level of support in our modeling tools for modeling SOAs. We define patterns, and the developer doesn't need to know about the code -- the code is created by the tool for them. We are building libraries of patterns that can be used in various parts of IT.

Many users at Rational's user conference earlier this year wanted to hear about Rational's plans for older modeling products Rational Rose and Rational xDE. Will Rational continue to enhance these products? We will continue to support these products. We are focusing most of our investment in Rational Software Modeler and Rational Architect tools. We still have some very important customers using Rational Rose. I am not trying to push customers off Rose until there is business value moving to Software Modeler or Software Architect.

Microsoft Corp. later this year will begin shipping it Visual Studio 2005 Team System, which also will focus on application life-cycle management. What is your take on their entry into your territory?Microsoft has done a really good job on focusing on the developer. They are starting to recognize that the developer is very important, but there is a much larger picture here. All of our tools are built on Eclipse - it is all about providing the capability for customers to be able to have plug-ins to the tools. There is a big ecosystem built around Eclipse. Other vendors can come and add capabilities to our tools. Ask Microsoft how many platforms they support.

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