IBM Rational announced that it would soon open a technology preview for deploying Jazz and related products as hosted services. Initial offerings slated for the cloud include Rational Team Concert, Quality Manager, Requirements Composer, Build Forge, Insight and Rational Asset Manager. The preview is targeted at customers wishing to deploy private clouds, such as a cloud managed by IBM inside its firewall or hosted as a virtual private instance on Amazon EC2, where IBM has developed Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for each of the products. A public cloud offering is not expected for at least a year.
However, the announcement was short on details, especially in terms of pricing, as IBM is still figuring out which mechanisms will work best. Although subscription pricing, which has been popularized by SaaS providers such as Salesforce.com, would be the obvious choice, our research has shown that ALM customers are a different breed. Experience with other ALM providers that already have cloud offerings found that some actually preferred traditional perpetual licensing. For IBM, Telelogic’s token-based pricing – a form of weighted unit pricing that depends on breadth of software functionality and usage – might prove applicable. The issue is that complex offerings such as Telelogic Focal Point (which was already available as a service) should be priced differently from narrower products such as Build Forge.
What’s more important is that IBM Software Group could use the cloud to redraw the slate on its offerings in the long run. The group already has experience repurposing common technology under different brands; for instance, the recent launch of the WebSphere Cloudburst appliance uses Rational Asset Manager to store WebSphere images, and Tivoli Provisioning Manager to deploy them. In this case, the cloud could give IBM Software the opportunity to piece together horizontal solutions such as software quality that pierce brand and functional silos. It would address a key business issue: that software quality is not simply defect density, but also the quality of service it delivers once in production. Such a solution could track quality from requirement definition through to test management and performance management, repurposing chunks of Rational Requirements Composer, Rational Quality Manager and Tivoli ITCAM.
IRON OUT THE DETAILS
When IBM closed the Telelogic acquisition just over a year ago, the big draw was Telelogic’s presence with engineering companies, which constituted new markets for Rational. Consequently, the ‘smarter products’ tagline unveiled at the conference was simply a rephrasing of a strategy that began with the acquisition. The strategy was devised by the former Telelogic group in response to IBM’s dictum that each software brand declares how it would put the meat behind IBM’s “smarter planet” positioning.
IBM’s strategy is to grow the Rational brand by growing Telelogic’s established footprint with engineering companies that were already using DOORS for managing requirements for complex systems, and Rhapsody for managing embedded software development. The rationale is perfect for software content increasing in durable products – and, in certain sectors, defining them.
However, product engineering companies have long considered software engineering as peripheral to their core mission, which is designing and bending metal and configuring electronic circuits. Consequently, IBM (or Rational/Telelogic) is not the incumbent technology supplier and must engage with product lifecycle management (PLM) suppliers Siemens, PTC and Dassault. IBM has yet to form PLM partnerships, although its 20+ year old Catia CACDAM reseller arrangement with Dassault would make a logical springboard.
As part of forging technology and go-to-market partnerships, IBM Rational has to figure out the terms of engagement with PLM vendors (and for customers) between its IT and engineering departments. This will be challenging considering that engineering organizations are just as full of silos as their IT counterparts, and that the processes supporting interaction between ALM and PLM have yet to be defined.
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