Welcome to this IBM Rational podcast, Bringing. Application Lifecycle Management to IBM i with Rational and

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1 IBM Podcast [ MUSIC ] Welcome to this IBM Rational podcast, Bringing Application Lifecycle Management to IBM i with Rational and ARCAD. I'm Kimberly Gist with IBM. Companies are realizing that they must up their game to remain competitive. For most, this means pushing out more sophisticated applications and in order to do this, they often must extend their back-end Power System to multiplatform front ends. In today's podcast, Chris Trobridge, product line manager for Rational Team Concert, and Philippe Magne, CEO and chairman for ARCAD Software, join us to discuss an integrated Rational Application Lifecycle Management solution for IBM i including the new archive pack for Rational which offers more programmer productivity and rapid application release. Chris, Philippe, welcome to the Rational Talks to You podcast series. Thank you for joining us. We're looking forward to your discussion today. TROBRIDGE: Thank you, Kimberly. Well, Chris, why don't we start with you. As -1-

2 companies are realizing that they must up their game to remain competitive and need to quickly push out new functionality to meet market demand, they run into application development and delivery challenges. What are some of these challenges and how can IBM Rational respond to these challenges for the IBM i environment? TROBRIDGE: Yes, Kimberly. As you rightly say, the push of mobile and cloud and Web-based interfaces through application is driving change rapidly through organization. And some IBM i development organizations are struggling to cope, first of all, with the pace of change and then with the complexity of combining these new applications with our legacy systems. So, at Rational we have come up with a solution with one of our close partners, ARCAD Software, to provide a development environment that can cope with these challenges. It's really built on a three prong. First of all, a modern development environment, Rational Developer for i, which provides the latest IDE environment for developers to work in in an assisted fashion, combining this with a lifecycle management environment, the Rational Team Concert, which provides collaboration capability, source code management and planning, allowing the legacy teams to work with the front-end teams together, whether -2-

3 they're working in an agile or traditional manner. And then, finally, to cope with the complexity of building and deploying applications for multiple platform, we've teamed up with ARCAD Software to provide application analysis, build and deployment technology that will enable customers to deploy across these platforms. And that product is the ARCAD Pack for Rational. Now, the second challenge these organizations face is that they typically have aging development organization and they need to bring in new developers into their environment and get them up to speed quickly. Now, it's a challenge for a developer leaving college to come in and work on legacy applications written in RPG. RPG is a very complex language, and it's not accessible to the new developer. So, we have as part of the new solution provided an environment that allows the developer to work in the familiar environment, in Rational Developer for i, to analyze the legacy applications using the ARCAD Pack for Rational and to convert the aging RPG into modern free form RPG which they'll be able to understand and work on more easily, cutting down tremendously the time it takes for developers to get work. And these are really the two main -3-

4 areas that IBM i development organizations face challenges with. That was a great explanation, Chris. Philippe, welcome to our podcast series. Chris mentioned the new ARCAD Pack for Rational. Philippe, why don't you tell us more about the ARCAD Pack for Rational for IBM i. Okay. So, if I would have to describe in very few words, I would say that it's certainly the best of both worlds in the fact that we are bringing along with Rational offer our 21 years of expertise in the specifically the IBM i space, and the combination of these two technologies is going to certainly be the new standards [INAUDIBLE] in the market within the IBM i space. We are completing our Rational, specifically the Rational Team Concert and RDI, which is new development environment that's more and more people have already adopted in VI space with the application analysis side of things. So, certainly the field where in fact we are adding a lot of value because we have been analyzing a lot of different applications throughout the world. And it's all about here transferring the knowledge on the new developer team on these very large legacy applications. -4-

5 And so it's used on a daily basis by the developers to make impact analysis, but also it does contain diagramming and documentation capabilities in order to rebuild the technical accommodation on an existing legacy application. On the other side, in fact, we provide a sophisticated build and deployment capability that allows to address the need of IBM i customers that have developed graphical front end on top of legacy applications. And their need is to really have a synchronous way to deploy different type of components in multiple production server all at the same time, managed through one single process and having strong traceability and security level in the entire change management process. You described it well, the best of both worlds, Philippe. So, can you give us additional insight into the new features in the ARCAD Pack for Rational that were recently announced? Yes. The app server is now, can be sold as a standalone product. So, that's for typically the people that are not yet aware about having a change management or even possibly are equipped with an existing one and don't have in mind to change quickly. So, this tool is really let's say a starting point for, as -5-

6 we said, having young developers being on board and being very productive up front by giving them a lot of information and to be able to have a quicker analytics and an understanding of these applications. Also what we have added in that's new is a new tool that we have developed with the help of IBM, and it is related with the latest release of the RPG compiler. So, it's a tool that is converting the RPG code into its free form. The look and feel of this new release of RPG is very close to Java and.net technologies, so it's way much more understandable, readable and of course, maintainable by young developers. So, it's a key element, very strategic in the IBM i space to have that kind of tool in order to let have new resources coming on board and be able to continue the maintenance of existing applications. And one final evolution we did in that latest release is the link with case tool. This is another also particularity of the IBM i market, the fact that there is a lot of customers that are equipped with case tools, the most famous ones are definitely Signum and Lanza. And in fact, if you put in place strong ANM processes in your organization, you definitely have to deal with development tools. And this is what we are able to provide -6-

7 and along with Rational technology. TROBRIDGE: That sounds very interesting, Philippe. I have one question about the RPG Converter. As a development organization, do I have to convert all my code at once, or can I convert part of it? It's up to you to decide. And what we see, clearly see now that it's going to be more, let's say, conversion on the fly. Means that as soon as a new developer has to maintain an existing code, it's at that time it's going to make the conversion while keeping the rest of the code being maintained by the rest of the team in the classical form of the RPG. TROBRIDGE: So, just to be clear, I can manage my old RPG, my new free-form RPG case tool software and my distributed software all from one interface using Rational Team Concert and the ARCAD Pack? Yes, absolutely. But definitely the proposal of that combined offer, and that's why we are so excited by that combined technology, because for sure it will address the need of, let's say, the need of existing and the future needs of the entire customer base. TROBRIDGE: So, I immediately get rid of the risk of part -7-

8 of my release being left behind or not synchronized with the releases being made throughout the platform. So, it's a much safer and more secure environment, would you say? Yes, absolutely. We need to have a lot of people be aware on the fact that this is the right solution to let them move forward with the existing IBM i applications, and the fact that they will have more and more distributed development in that formation system, and it's the perfect fit to move in that direction in a secure manner. TROBRIDGE: Thank you, Philippe. I think I understand that. Well, Chris, how can a client order this solution? TROBRIDGE: This solution can be bought from your local IBM representative. So, if you don't know who that is, you can go to ibm.com and make contact within IBM there. Or it can be bought through ARCAD Software, and their Web site is arcadsoftware.com. Both parties can sell the whole solution for IBM ARCAD resellers and ARCAD IBM reseller. So, the solution is available from both companies. Wonderful. And one last question for you, -8-

9 Chris and Philippe. What would you say are the next steps clients can take to get started? TROBRIDGE: Well, if you want to see the solution in action, then the first pot of call I would take would be YouTube. If you go to YouTube and search on Rational and ARCAD, you will see videos of the solution in action. In addition, there are regular webinars on the solutional parts of the solution. If you want to see the ones [INAUDIBLE] ARCAD, then you can go to arcadsoftware.com and look at the event calendar, and there are regular webinars, for example, on the RPG Converter. Also, if you want more details about Rational Team Concert, then you can go to jazz.net where the same videos are available and documentation and descriptions about how to set up the system. You can also track our development because we do open commercial development, so you can see what we're working on, what's coming in the future. Yes, we simply add that we are very active in the different local user group communities throughout the world, and especially in America. So, of course, we are doing a lot of [INAUDIBLE] stations on that package, as well as, Chris mentioned we are doing regular webinars. So, just have to register directly from our website on different -9-

10 pieces of [INAUDIBLE] both from the RPG Converter but also on the entire picture, the ARCAD and Rational technology. Well, thank you, Chris and Philippe. A great overview on the relationship between IBM i and ARCAD and how the solution is contributing to advances in Application Lifecycle Management. We sincerely appreciate you taking the time to join us and share your expertise today. TROBRIDGE: Thank you very much, Kimberly, for organizing. Thank you. Thank you. Additional resources are available on ibm.com or jazz.net in addition to a number of videos that are available on YouTube when you search both IBM Rational and ARCAD together and of course at arcad.com. That was Chris Trobridge, product line manager for Rational Team Concert, and Philippe Magne, CEO and chairman for ARCAD Software, with some key points for today's podcast event, Bringing Application Lifecycle Management to IBM i With Rational in ARCAD. To hear this specific podcast or to browse additional topics, check out our Rational Talks to You podcast page at This has been an IBM podcast. -10-

11 I'm your moderator. [END OF SEGMENT] -11-