Company's Jazz platform is leveraged in its Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration along with HTML, REST, and XML IBM is pressing forward with an initiative intended to simplify collaboration in application lifecycle management projects that use products from multiple vendors.Called Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration, the effort announced this week purports to enable collaboration based on a common architecture leveraging HTML, REST, and XML data formats and protocols used by the company’s Jazz ALM platform. IBM is seeking other vendors, including rivals like Borland and Microsoft, to collaborate on the architecture.“We’re creating an industry initiative to publish those protocols,” said Martin Nally, IBM Rational CTO. “So far, this is an effort to publish an initial specification along with some sample code that shows how to implement both clients and servers that [use] these protocols,” Nally said.The architecture would ensure interoperability of software development resources, such as project requirements and test plans; customers could assemble a software development platform using preferred tools and vendors. A first step is to try to build a community of shared interests around the effort with a view of providing standards in the long term, Nally said. Software Development