Interview: IBM’s Sabbah touts Rational offerings

Daniel Sabbah is general manger of IBM Rational Software, within the IBM Software Group. Prior to that, he was vice president of software development, strategy, and architecture for the group. Having begun his IBM career in 1974, Sabbah is experienced in both product development and software research, according to the company. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with Sabbah in San Francisco last week to discuss IBM’s application lifecycle management efforts and talk about other subjects such as open source.

InfoWorld: How does IBM Rational differ from Microsoft in its approach to application development and application lifecycle management?

Daniel Sabbah: [IBM’s] story is much more sophisticated in its understanding of what people do with the business process of software development than where Microsoft is today. They don’t have any of [these capabilities today, including governance, compliance, globalization. [We understand] what the benefits of leveraging broader communities are and dynamically creating those communities, that kind of thing. So in essence, basically, from a differentiable standpoint we’re already well ahead of where they are. They’re trying to fill out their particular portfolio to just manage basic lifecycle. [We’re already] running while they’re crawling, essentially.

InfoWorld: Specifically, what is IBM’s take on Microsoft’s Team System and Team Foundation Server in Visual Studio 2005? Or basically, is it what you pretty much just said?

Sabbah: Yes, that’s basically what I said: Welcome to the world of application lifecycle management. Now Microsoft only has about 20 years to catch up to where everybody else is.

InfoWorld: Is Borland’s selling off its Java and Windows tools simply an indication that it couldn’t compete with Microsoft and open source?

Sabbah: Yes. I think that that’s an accurate statement. Borland is getting into this space around lifecycle management, or trying to. And they’ve decided that the value that comes out of individual tools for isolated capabilities, like J2EE or something like that, is not something that they feel they can compete with in light of a lot of the open source efforts around Eclipse.

InfoWorld: So would you say that Borland, instead of trying to compete with Microsoft and Eclipse, is now trying to compete with IBM Rational? What kind of chance do you give them?

Sabbah: I don’t give them much of a chance, because basically I have multiple sides of this equation. I mean I’m leveraging Eclipse, but I’m also not giving up on the developer tools, because I think I can add value there. And I think it’s also important in being able to actually govern the entire lifecycle process to have core construction tools and assembly tools, so I’m not giving up on that. And then, think about the capabilities that I have in my portfolio to build out these communities of interest and to build out global solutions that scale, that have federated databases, that have the ability to actually manage that kind of development process. When you look at the power of the whole IBM portfolio being brought to bear on that particular space of software engineering, software and systems engineering, I don’t think that there’s anybody that can hold a candle to us .… I’m not going to try to judge Borland. I’m just saying that I like our chances.

InfoWorld: How do you compete with the free offerings of Eclipse when you have a price tag on your products? At what point is it that there’s so much value-add on the Eclipse stuff that who needs to buy any software?

Sabbah: How do I compete with the open source world?

InfoWorld: Yes.

Sabbah: The open source world is not providing any of these types of solutions. What they’re doing is they’re providing base capability in building out just core elements, like Java code or J2EE code or basic UML (Unified Modeling Language) modeling or any of those things. I mean they’re providing standards for me to then leverage, but they’re not providing governance solutions, they’re not providing compliance solutions, they’re not providing end-to-end SLA solutions, and they’re not managing all of those things.

InfoWorld: These days, do you think software development has become a match-up of Eclipse versus .Net versus LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python/PHP), or is it still Java versus .Net?

Sabbah: I think it’s the open world versus .Net. There’s nothing inherently conflicting in LAMP and Eclipse. So I don’t see those as conflicting issues. And Java is one of the core constituents, but basically Eclipse is being used for developing C/C++ code, for developing Java code, for developing all kinds of assets.

InfoWorld: What do you see as the impact on software development of these new scripting languages that are coming out, such as PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor)?

Sabbah: We are embracing PHP. So basically we don’t see it as a threat or anything else. We see all of these efforts, JavaScript-based efforts, PHP-based efforts, like AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) or whatever, basically, as help. They don’t conflict with Java per se. They make it easier to consume, which is great.

InfoWorld: IBM bought up Rational several years ago. Is there anything more that needs to be done to merge the two companies or is everything pretty much completed?

Sabbah: Everything’s done. Everything’s in the past, basically. Rational is now a brand in the software group, it’s not a separate company. So it’s integrated from a sales standpoint, from a development standpoint, from a marketing standpoint. Everything is fully integrated into IBM at this point.