IBM updates Rational tools for cloud, mobile

IDG News Service - With a focus on both cloud and mobile, IBM has updated its Rational line of software development management products and services, the company announced Monday during the kick off its annual Innovate software conference, being held this week in Orlando.

"We've been building software to deal with cloud as a production environment and mobile as an avenue to deliver business applications," said Harish Grama, IBM vice president of Rational product development.

IBM's Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) software is one of the updated products. CLM coordinates information across a number of other IBM Rational products, namely IBM Rational Requirements Composer, IBM Rational Team Concert, and IBM Rational Quality Manager. With this information, CLM summarizes how a project is progressing as it moves through development to testing to production.

The new version of CLM, 4.0, can now be run across a cluster of servers, which will allow for larger development environments. This is also the first version of the software to incorporate the virtual testing environments that IBM acquired when it purchased Green Hat in January.

IBM has introduced a number of new development services on its SmartCloud hosted offerings. A new pilot called, IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery, provides a way to coordinate project development using DevOps methodology. This platform "allows you to establish a pipeline of moving bits through various test cases," Grama said. It can work with both IBM development software as well as with popular third-party software, such as Puppet.

The company also now offers a development management service specifically for government agencies, called IBM SmartCloud for Government, which complies with Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) security standards. It is also offering CLM as a service through SmartCloud.

The company has also assembled a package for enterprise mobile development. The Enterprise Mobile Development collection includes Rational CLM, Worklight Studio 5.0, Worklight Server 5.0, Rational Application Developer version 8.5, Rational Developer for System z version 8.5, Rational Developer for Power Systems version 8.5, and IBM Application Center 5.0. It includes an SDK and emulator for testing mobile applications for use on Android phones.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com