IBM Corp and Rational Software Inc yesterday formalized their longstanding partnership by announcing a strategic alliance with the aim of better integrating their products for companies developing e-business applications. Under the alliance, the two said they would deliver, later this week, an XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) bridge that will integrate IBM’s VisualAge for Java application development environment with the Rational Rose suite.
The integration works by enabling Visual Age to read Java code, transforming it into XMI definitions and, from that, creating a visual model in Rational Rose. This presents developers with a graphical representation of the architecture of the code they have written. The process also works in reverse. Developers can design an architecture graphically by drawing pictures in UML (unified modeling language) and then immediately generate Java code from those pictures in Visual Age for Java. The new integration, available from June 30, will be delivered as an add- in to Visual Age for Java at www.software.ibm.com/vadd for registered users. The product will ship as part of IBM’s Visual Age for Java Enterprise Edition.
John Swainson, general manager of IBM’s software group, said the decision to form a partnership, rather than carry on integrating on an informal basis, was driven by customer demand. We have joint customers already using our products together and they came to us wanting better integration to enable them to build their e- business applications faster, he said. Moreover, it’s not just about developing applications, he said, companies will gain competitive advantage according to how fast they can implement business process changes every month. Already, the two have integrated four of their product offerings: Rational’s Test Studio can be used to automate and test applications written in Visual Age, and its Performance Studio suite can test applications built on IBM’s Websphere Application Server. In addition, IBM’s Insurance Industry Architecture features integration with Rational Rose and IBM’s San Francisco components currently ships Rational Rose models with the San Francisco Application Framework.
Swainson said the two companies wouldn’t be developing any new products per se, rather they would work together to insure the tight integration of existing and future offerings. A promise which doesn’t sound too dissimilar from what they do now, but Swainson insisted that putting a partnership hat on would let the companies ensure that integration going forward. It’s [the integration] not been as complete as we are talking about now, he said. He declined to say what would be different about the way Rational and IBM would integrate their products from here on in, adding only that the two would jointly develop the code for further integration. Neither will the joint products be sold together as one bundle, Swainson said, as both companies will continue to sell their products separately and pricing will stay as normal. He didn’t rule out bundling products completely, however, adding that we’re not announcing that at this time.
Mike Devlin, CEO of Rational, said together the two companies covered the complete application lifecycle with tools for designing, developing, testing and deploying e-business applications. The partnership, he said, was simply about integrating those products so it’s easier for customers to use them in a consistent way. But on top of that, Rational will use the alliance to leverage IBM’s customer mindshare in the e- business space. The company has already stated e-business related sales could account for 25% of its March revenues, so tighter integration with IBM’s products is no doubt designed to help achieve that.
Also as part of the alliance, Rational will more fully embrace IBM’s Application Framework for e-business, allowing the company to more easily integrate its technologies across the breadth of IBM’s major development platforms, from mainframes to Windows NT- based servers. In time, it will also enable the software firm to generate revenues off the back of IBM’s mainframe platform, which up till now Rational has not addressed, preferring instead to concentrate on NT and Unix.
