Posts Tagged ‘collaboration’
IBM Expands Collaborative Software Development Solutions to Cloud, Mobile Technologies
At IBM Innovate in Orlando earlier today, the company announced a range of new software solutions that will help clients create software applications faster and with higher quality across multiple development environments including cloud, mobile, and complex systems.
The software world’s push toward continuously evolving systems necessitates consistency and collaboration across the entire software lifecycle and supply chain. Often software development teams are struggling to meet business expectations due to a lack of hard facts.
There is a need for shared data and a consistent context across organizational boundaries, exposed through clear and honest metrics.
To address these challenges, IBM is introducing a new version of its integrated software Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution with extended design management capabilities.
CLM is built on IBM’s open development platform, Jazz, and brings together IBM Rational Requirements Composer, IBM Rational Team Concert, and IBM Rational Quality Manager in one easy-to-install and easy-to-use solution. The new CLM software ensures that software design is integrated with the rest of the software application development lifecycle.
Development teams are now able to seamlessly collaborate on the design and development of software with key stakeholders from across the business.
According to preliminary findings of an IBM Institute for Business Value Global Study on software delivery, more than three-fourths of the participating organizations said they are underprepared for major technology trends that will impact their competitiveness.
These trends include the proliferation of mobile devices, the ability to leverage cloud-based resources for flexibility and savings, and the growing percentage of smart products with embedded software. While 50 percent of organizations believe successful software delivery is crucial to their competitive advantage, only 25 percent currently leverage it.
“Today’s business dilemma is how to address both the need for rapid delivery and sufficient control in the software development process,” said Dr. Kristof Kloeckner, general manager, IBM Rational. “We must balance the need for speed and agility with better governance to manage cost and quality, achieve regulatory compliance, ensure security, and have some level of financial predictability.”
Top Bank in China Transforms Core Processes
China Merchants Bank (CMB), headquartered in Shenzhen, China, has over 800 branches, more than 50,000 employees and is cited as one of the world’s top 100 banks. China Merchants Bank environment spans IBM System z and IBM Power platforms.
With geographically dispersed developers responsible for modernizing core banking and credit card processing applications, collaboration became essential. CMB uses IBM Rational CLM software capabilities to create a multiplatform application lifecycle management (ALM) environment to help automate their development processes and breakdown skills silos for effective cross-teaming.
“IBM Rational Developer and ALM tools were brought into our credit card migration and core banking system project,” said Zhanwen Chen, manager of configuration management, China Merchants Bank. “Replacing older tools and coordinating the efforts of our 1,000+ developers improved our quality and performance.”
DevOps in the Cloud
In a typical organization, it may take weeks or months to deliver a development change, due to infrastructure and configuration, testing and manual deployment, and lack of collaboration between development and operations teams.
Continuous software delivery in the cloud allows customers to continuously and automatically deliver changes across the enterprise software delivery lifecycle, spanning development, application testing and operations. With a “DevOps” approach in the cloud, customers can reduce time to market and automate changes in development, test and production.
IBM is supporting cloud delivery, development and operations with new solutions, including:
- IBM Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management on IBM SmartCloud Enterprise provides an agile cloud computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) well suited for development and test that is designed to provide rapid access to secure, enterprise-class virtual server environments.
- The IBM SmartCloud Application Services pilot provides a pay-as-you-go service that coordinates activities across business and system requirements, design, development, build, test and delivery.
- IBM SmartCloud for Government Development and Test Platform as a service delivers industry-leading Rational tools for government agencies in a highly scalable, elastic computing environment for agencies that want the cost savings of a shared cloud environment combined with Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) security.
- IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery managed beta via a hosted sandbox in the cloud, provides a hands-on-experience of DevOps capabilities enabling accelerated code-to-deploy through automation, standardization of repeatable processes and improved coordination and visibility among development, test and operations teams.
- IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management software provides comprehensive monitoring and management capabilities that enable development and operations professionals to reduce costly troubleshooting. It also provides free resources to focus on developing new innovations and services for customers. With this tighter integration, application issues can be found and resolved faster, but also proactively prevented to avoid future service disruption.
Enterprise Mobile Development
IBM Rational CLM has also been extended to the IBM Mobile Foundation platform for centralized code sharing and distributed mobile application development.
Currently, fragmentation of mobile devices, tools, and platforms complicates delivery of mobile applications that typically have faster time-to-market and more frequent releases.
The IBM Enterprise Mobile Development solution helps teams apply an end-to-end lifecycle management process to design, develop, test and deploy mobile applications while enabling seamless integration with enterprise back-end systems and cloud services through mobile-optimized middleware. The Enterprise Mobile Development solution brings together several offerings that optimize the recent Worklight acquisition as well as IBM enterprise development environments, including:
- Rational Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management
- IBM Worklight Studio 5.0 and IBM Worklight Server 5.0
- Rational Application Developer v8.5
- Rational Developer for System z v8.5
- Rational Developer for Power Systems v8.5
- IBM Application Center 5.0
- Android SDK and Emulator
Green Hat Technology in New IBM Test Automation Solutions
Today’s applications and manufactured products put additional pressures on development teams to find innovative ways to attain agility and increase the rate that software updates are delivered for testing.
IBM has integrated the recently acquired Green Hat technology with IBM Rational CLM to help address the challenges of testing highly integrated and complex systems and simplify the creation of virtual test environments.
New IBM test automation solutions use virtualized test environments and can reduce costs associated with the setup, maintenance and tear down of infrastructure associated with traditional testing or cloud based implementations.
Over a Decade of IBM Software Development Leadership
For the eleventh consecutive year, IBM has been named the number one shareholder in the worldwide application development software market according to Gartner with 25 percent of the market.
Gartner reported that IBM continues to lead in key and growing segments includingDistributed Software Change & Configuration Management, Requirements Elicitation and Management, Design and Java Platform AD Tools, and realized 25 percent growth in the Security Testing (DAST & SAST) market.
Additionally, according to Evans Data Corporation’s Users’ Choice: 2012 Software Development Platforms, for the overall platform rankings, IBM’s Rational continues its reign as the most highly rated overall offering, an honor they have obtained 6 in the last 7 years in this Evans Data survey of 1,200 developers globally.
Can We Meet?
I’ve made it through the most difficult part of my journey. Getting safely from Austin to Dallas.
You’d be surprised at how many things can go wrong between the Austin and Dallas airports.
DFW to Tokyo Narita, no problemo. Beijing, piece of cake. Austin to Dallas, or vice versa, God rest your weary traveling soul, anything can and often does go wrong.
You may remember the time I was coming back from somewhere (Las Vegas, I think it was) and ended up spending what should have been an unnecessary night at the DFW Hilton.
Then there was the time it took me 1 hour and 45 minutes to fly from Dallas to Austin, typically a 35-45 minute flight (although to be fair, on that particular voyage, the weather was exceptionally bad).
It’s enough to make somebody want to have better scheduling software with their messaging systems.
So the timing is perfect for the announcement IBM and Tungle made just yesterday, whereby Tungle announced the availability of its Tungle.me software for Lotus Notes.
Already, more than 20 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using Tungle.me to save time scheduling meetings, and more than half of the largest global 100 corporations use IBM’s flagship collaboration offerings, Lotus Notes and Domino.
Tungle.me makes it much simpler for people to schedule meetings across organizations, calendar systems and time zones by eliminating costly double bookings and the endless back and forth of finding a time to meet.
As Tungle CEO Marc Gingras explained, “With the introduction of Tungle.me for Lotus Notes, many millions of additional business people around the world can spend more time being productive and less time playing scheduling ping-pong.”
I like ping-pong. The real kind. But not the how-in-the-world-are-we-going-to-find-a-good-time-to-meet kind.
The addition of Lotus Notes means that Tungle now works with all major business- and consumer-oriented electronic calendar environments, including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage, and is also available on the iPhone and BlackBerry.
With Tungle.me for Lotus Notes you can set custom availability and synchronize it with your Lotus Notes calendar. Once meetings are scheduled, they are automatically updated in the background.
Check out the video demonstration below to see Tungle and Lotus Notes in action:
Me, I’m off to crank up on the caffeine for my short flight to Tokyo.
See you from Singapore.
Lotusphere 2010: Opening Session Debrief
Lotus knows why. Lotus knows how.
That’s the Lotusphere 2010 conference mantra, according to outgoing Lotus general manager Bob Picciano, who kick started today’s opening session before handing the reins over immediately to Captain Kirk.
Yes, Ladies and Gentleman, William Shatner was finally in the Lotus house, and despite a short talk, it was spot on in terms of its message to the Lotus faithful.
Moviemaking, like business everywhere, is ultimately about collaboration, Shatner explained, and the only thing that makes completing the work possible is the collaboration of everybody.
Shatner also reminded us that remakes are great if only they remind you how great the originals are, seeming to suggest Lotus was the original collaboration software partner. Hear hear.
Shatner also joked with the Loti that he could help them save on a hotel room or rental car while in Orlando.
After the Enterprise beamed Shatner away to much applause, Bob Picciano returned with some key messages he’ll leave us with as he makes his way to broader IBM shores as head of all software sales.
First, the Lotus Knows campaign, which lifted Lotus out of the IT trenches and into the faces of enterprise line of business leaders around the globe. Rock on Lotus marketing.
Bob explained that this campaign demonstrates the benefit of investing in the Lotus portfolio to help your organization become more productive, period.
He also highlighted the fact that 18,378 customers, to be exact, have signed on to use Lotus Notes since release 8.
And in a straight on jab, he highlighted the fact that Lotus is “freeing you from paying outrageous licensing fees for software which should be a commodity.”
He would be talking about office productivity software. Expect more on the Lotus Symphony front soon.
Finally, Bob introduced what he called the “Collaboration Agenda,” that is, a strategic view of how companies want their employees and stakeholders to work better together.
The Collaboration Agenda is an industry-specific, structured approach to help Lotus clients realize measurable business value from improving the way people interact. (A recent survey by IDC shows that 66% of businesses believe that a thorough understanding of their business is important or very important for a vendor.”)
The Collaboration Agenda provides a way for organizations to view how they’re working today, and to identify gaps where people can be better equipped to improve and speed their roles and processes.
This morning, Picciano also announced industry-specific ROI metrics around collaboration capabilities for four key industries, including banking, insurance, government, and healthcare providers/payers.
He also announced a reselling agreement with BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, including an agreement between RIM and Lotus for Lotus to sell BlackBerry Client for Lotus Connections and BlackBerry Client for Lotus Quickr.
A new version of both products will be released on January 18th.
RIM Chief Technology Officer David Yach also spoke onstage about RIM’s having recently purchased new versions of IBM Lotus Connections, Quickr, and Sametime for his own organization to be more collaborative on the go.
There are more announcements to come.
Keep an eye on Ed Brill’s blog for some of the latest, including Lotus Notes Traveler Android support and encrypted Notes mail for the iPhone via the Lotus Notes Traveler Companion.
Also, keep your eyes peeled here on the IBM Press Room for more details on all the announcements shortly.