Catching up with IBM Rational

When I was the programming columnist and programming tools reviewer at Windows Magazine, I would hear from the PR people at Pure Atria on at least a weekly basis. It became a joke between me and the reviews editor: I would never be lonely, as long as Pure Atria had my contact information.

In 1997, Rational Software acquired Pure Atria, and I began hearing about Rational object-oriented analysis and design products like Rose as well as Pure Atria products like Purify. The frequency of their transmissions dropped, however: I’d hear from Rational every month or two, when they released a new product version.

In 2002, IBM acquired Rational Software for $2.1 billion, in a move that surprised nearly everyone. Once the acquisition was completed, I never heard from Rational again. By that time, I was writing for Byte.com, and had plenty of topics in the queue: I never even noticed that the flow of information from Rational had stopped, until sometime in 2003, when I read about a new IBM Rational product version that I hadn’t known about in advance.

Last month, out of the blue, I heard from an outside PR person working with IBM Rational: would I like an interview with IBM Rational’s GM Danny Sabbah? Of course I would. I didn’t ask what happened to Mike Devlin, who I remembered as President of Rational before the IBM acquisition.

I got to speak with Danny last Monday. It was a genial conversation, even though I was dreadfully out of date on my knowledge about IBM Rational’s products. Sabbah is a Ph.D. computer scientist who has been in the software industry since the 1970s, mostly at IBM. He took over IBM Rational when Mike Devlin retired in 2005; before that, Sabbah managed IBM Software, and was responsible for about 20,000 software developers working on products like WebSphere. So yes, he knows something about programming in the large, and managing distributed development efforts.

Since I last looked at Rational Rose ten years ago, it has become a whole family of products for model-driven development. It has been joined by newer products like Rational Application Developer and Rational Software Architect. The Rational desktop modeling tools have been moved to Eclipse, and expanded to use UML 2.0 and design patterns. I have a lot more catching up to do here.

Meanwhile, IBM Rational is on to something new. The guys behind Eclipse, Erich Gamma (of “Gang of Four” fame) and John Wiegand, are working on a project called Jazz. Danny has written a white paper about this called The Future of Software Delivery, which you can download from here. If you don’t already have an ID for the IBM site, you’ll have to create one; you’ll also have to answer a few sales-oriented questions.

The short summary is that the Jazz project is about integrated, globally distributed, Web-centric life-cycle development, with an emphasis on governance. “It’s about integrating software engineering from the ground up,” Sabbah told me.

Danny also told me that Jazz was demoed at EclipseCon last week, and that in June the self-hosted Jazz community at Jazz.net will open for business. The base elements of Jazz will be open source, with an open set of APIs, very much in the spirit of Eclipse.

Maybe I’ll be able to stay on top of this a little better from now on.