But going forward, Rational faces the challenges and opportunities of open source, plus a newly assertive Microsoft, which is beginning to deliver an alternative framework for the application lifecycle. And it must finally bite the bullet and renew its team tools.
When Rational began staking its claim to the application lifecycle, programming languages weren’t commodities, but coding environments were.
Its original lifecycle product set navigated around programming languages in favor of the tooling that you needed to support development, such as planning, modeling, requirements analysis, source code control, configuration management, and testing. And the partner that gave Rational credibility was Microsoft, which packaged a lite version of Rational ROSE as Visual Modeler.
Today Rational is part of IBM, languages and integrated development environments are given away as loss leaders. The open source community is offering free tooling going higher up the food chain into areas like modeling, requirements, and source code control. And Microsoft is becoming a serious competitor.
Danny Sabbah, general manager of Rational, contends that while tools are commodity, the connective tissue, the process, and knowledge for unifying it aren’t. For example, Rational won’t necessarily develop compliance products per se, but it will leverage best practices from IBM Global Services and partners to develop the templates for documenting the software lifecycle as part of a compliance strategy.
Nonetheless, to get mindshare, you have to give something away. Yesterday, it was an entry level of Rational ROSE freely distributed by Microsoft. Today it’s open sourcing the tooling and the processes that support it.
Last fall, Compuware and Serena fired the first shot by taking charge of an Eclipse initiative to build the back end for application lifecycle management frameworks. Somebody on the Eclipse side had to do it, because Microsoft is now bundling a copy of its own ALM framework, Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), with the Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment).
Having invented ALM as a suite of products, it was surprising that Rational didn’t step up to the plate. Instead, their priority is process. Barely a week after the Compuware/Serena announcement, Rational announced Project Beacon, an Eclipse framework for software development process.
As part of Beacon, Rational contributed about 15% of RUP. What’s more important is that Beacon was not a strategy to throw RUP itself to the open source wolves. Instead, said Sabbah, it was a strategy for starting the conversation. It’s way too early in a community building exercise to donate more process, he said.
More importantly, however, with Beacon, the Rational Unified Process is no longer the center of the universe. Beacon drew signatories ranging from Philip Krutchen, who first authored RUP; Ivar Jacobsen, who invented use case modeling before joining Rational; and Scott Ambler, who is associated with agile processes often considered antithetical to much of RUP.
Beacon also provides a way for IBM to unify other processes inherited from Global Services and the former PwC Consulting (now Business Consulting Services). A week after announcing Beacon, IBM announced Rational Method Composer, its successor to the RUP tooling, which has been decoupled from RUP to support any Project Beacon-compliant process.
Such loosely coupling is likely to be part of the architecture of the successors to the team tools RequisitePro (requirements), ClearCase (source code control), and ClearQuest (defect tracking), which Sabbah says will start trickling out later this year. As noted previously (see Computergram, January 5, 2005), much of Rational’s future is hinging on how it renews the team tools at the core of its franchise.
The final challenge is deciding how to deal with its former partner-turned-rival Microsoft. According to Sabbah, Rational won’t compete directly in the .NET pure play market, but instead target its tools for customers working in Java or mixed environments, which could include .NET. That shouldn’t be surprising, given IBM’s Java orientation and the fact that for now, .NET still plays mostly to modest-sized enterprises that can’t afford IBM prices.
Rational still hasn’t figured out what to make of VSTS. I’m looking at it. I haven’t seen enough of it outside foils to devise a successful product with it, said Sabbah, who continued, Are we playing with and experimenting with it? Absolutely. Have we announced any products in test realm that would compete or supplement Microsoft test tools? Not yet.
For too long, Rational neglected its core application lifecycle market. By taking its eye off its core products for a decade, it gave rivals such as Borland, Compuware, Serena, and now even Microsoft, a chance to catch up.
Consequently, Rational is no longer the only ALM game in town. But open source opens a new world of opportunities for Rational and rivals alike in a playing field that is becoming more level. Whether its recovery in late 2005 is the start of something new, or just a blip on the radar screen, will ride on its long-awaited answers in team development.
