Significantly, roughly two thirds of BuildForge’s 60 customers are also Rational customers, with the company attaining Ready for Rational certification from IBM last fall.

The private company, which IBM bought for an undisclosed amount, had been growing 30% quarter on quarter for the last year and a half. BuildForge will be absorbed into IBM’s Rational software brand, but as yet, IBM has not decided whether it will retain the BuildForge brand for the products.

BuildForge has a single product family with four offerings. They include Build Forge FullControl, the core engine that manages the build process.

Additionally, there is BuildForge FullThrottle, which provides an accelerator for deploying builds across multiple servers in highly distributed environments.

Finally, there BuildForge Prism, which is the developer IDE, plus adapters to Rational ClearCASE and other third party source code control systems.

The control of software builds, where code is assembled into the build that is sent through test and release cycles, has typically been one of the least automated points of the application life cycle.

In most cases, development teams either use open source build facilities like ANT, fabricate their own homegrown build routines, or use OpenMake’s Catalyst, one of the few other commercially available automated build products out there.

Surprisingly, although OpenMake and Build Forge do compete, in some cases they don’t. According to Gregg Burtt, previously CEO of BuildForge, who will continue heading the product for IBM, in some cases there were joint customers. The difference is that OpenMake automates the process of developing build scripts, whereas BuildForge doesn’t.

According to Lee Nackman, vice president of IBM Rational product development and customer support, IBM won’t bother adding such automated scripting capabilities in the future.

Looking at Eclipse, there is plenty of support for ANT, he said. I don’t see that as a major market that we would want to focus on.

Instead, said Nackman, IBM is looking to weave BuildForge closer into Rational ClearCASE, which controls source code; Rational; ClearQuest, which tracks issues; the Rational Unified Process (RUP); and IBM Tivoli, for establishing an audit trail of builds that make it into production. In addition to automating the build process, Nackman says that the tracking could also provide a compliance tool.

IBM also indicates that it will continue supporting BuildForge’s interfaces to ClearCASE rivals as a strategy to gain foothold in new accounts, and might even consider maintaining ties with OpenMake if it is willing.

IBM will announce more definitive plans for BuildForge products during the rational user conference in June.