IBM senior vice president and group executive Steve Mills said yesterday the company wants to provide a highly optimized deployment to the Microsoft runtime using hooks from its WebSphere Studio development environment.
Opening IBM’s developerWorks Live! Conference, Mills said code optimized for the runtime environment is important to improving productivity of programmers from design through to development.
Mills, speaking in New Orleans, Louisiana, claimed IBM last year earned $2.5bn in revenue from Windows and wants to increase that share of its business using code optimization.
Rivals’ Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platforms have already fallen in IBM’s crosshairs. News last week leaked of a planned plug-in for WebSphere Studio to rival BEA Systems Inc’s WebLogic J2EE application server.
Mills called that particular plug-in a business opportunity that enabled IBM to sell WebSphere tools and – ultimately – the application server. He claimed 30% of WebLogic Server customers use WebSphere Studio. Getting customers on our tools is strategically advantageous to selling them more WebSphere, Mills said.
As for Windows, IBM already has a toe in that water through last year’s Rational acquisition, which gave IBM Rational’s Unified Modeling Language (UML) -based development environment Extended Development Experience (XDE). XDE offers an embedded UML tool for use inside Visual Studio.NET and WebSphere Studio.
Mills said, though, IBM wants to go beyond a simple plug-in for WebSphere Studio to Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET development environment – a strategy used by many tools vendors to tap Windows programming and deployment environments.
Hence, the company is keen to get greater information from Microsoft about COM and COM+ services for .NET covering aspects such as code path linking and code shrinkage. Without such data, Mill claimed, IBM could only provide vanilla optimization.
Speaking to ComputerWire afterwards, Microsoft .NET developer group product manager Dino Chiesa appeared mystified by Mills comments. He called IBM one of Microsoft’s closest partners and said the two companies already worked very closely. Chiesa suggested Mills was simply playing to the crowd or attempting to stand out against J2EE rivals by associating itself with Microsoft.
IBM, meanwhile, plans to further expand Rational tools during the coming year, focusing on modeling and testing. Rational will draw on technologies in the db2, Lotus, WebSphere and Tivoli business units, IBM’s experience in Linux and a potential wealth of ideas that are locked-up in vast research and development operations.
Mike Devlin, general manager of IBM’s Rational business unit, said that since the acquisition, Rational has so far leveraged DB2 and connections to Tivoli and Linux. This has helped Rational’s concept of software configuration into something called enterprise change.
By connecting to the WebSphere platform we can generate highly optimized code, Devlin, former Rational chief executive, said. He added that this approach also enabled Rational to serve IBM’s eBusiness-on-Demand strategy.
Source: Computerwire
