The fun thing about IBM is that although it is a giant corporation it sometimes laughs at itself and even tries to inject a bit of humor into high tech. For example, witness it giving the code name T-Rex to its mainframes after rival Sun Microsystems ran a series of ads in which it said IBM was a dinosaur and that the company belonged in a museum. For all of its heralded stodginess and reputation as a company t The fun thing about IBM is that although it is a giant corporation it sometimes laughs at itself and even tries to inject a bit of humor into high tech. For example, witness it giving the code name T-Rex to its mainframes after rival Sun Microsystems ran a series of ads in which it said IBM was a dinosaur and that the company belonged in a museum.For all of its heralded stodginess and reputation as a company that at one time required its employees to wear blue suits and white shirts, it is in fact one of the few giant high tech enterprises that continues to innovate and I must say fascinate, at least some of the things it does fascinates this reporter. This brings me to the latest fascinating bit of news out of Big Blue. They call it Jazz. Jazz combines the concept of open source, collaboration and unified communications [UC]into a single online application that allows developers to work with one another in a truly collaborative environment. This is not an ad hoc instance of developers having a set of collaboration tools in one window and their developer tools in another. Rather Jazz integrates UC tools like Instant Messaging with the IDE [Integrated Development Environment]. In the same window a developer can have the editor, compiler and debugger along with IM, presence, VoIP phone and so forth.Jazz is built on Eclipse technology and Web standards and uses IBM’s Rationale development tools. Obviously, there are a lot more collaborative components than this. Go to the Web site, see link above, and find out for yourself. The driving force behind Jazz is the ever growing complexity of IT projects that require dozens of different interconnected modules which require a huge team of often geographically remote development teams to complete.Jazz addresses this challenge by bringing together under one virtual roof what typically has become a worldwide development effort to complete an enterprise-scale project. Frankly, I don’t see any other company doing this on this scale and with this level of sophistication. Technology Industry