ACADEMIA

IBM 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 including Distributed 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.