Welcome to this IBM podcast, what's new in. solutions for building smarter products and systems? I'm

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1 IBM Podcast [ MUSIC ] Welcome to this IBM podcast, what's new in solutions for building smarter products and systems? I'm Angelique Matheny with IBM. Achieving compliance with new industry standards is critical in industries delivering safety critical systems, including medical devices, automobiles, airplanes and defense systems. Co-development of hardware and software increases efficiency and quality. An IBM solution for building complex and embedded systems now provides industry-specific content to help companies realize these goals. And in today's podcast, Sue Green with IBM Rational Worldwide Solutions Marketing and Andrew Foster with IBM Rational Worldwide Solution for Systems and Software, they'll join us and we'll hear about these and other new capabilities in the IBM Rational Solution for Systems and Software Engineering and learn how to adjust challenges in new safety critical standards. So hi, Sue. Hi, Andrew. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us today. GREEN: Thank you. -1-

2 FOSTER: Hi, there. Sue, let's start with this. What are the customer needs and market trends in building smarter products and systems? GREEN: Well, thank you very much. And as you mentioned, you know, many of those smarter products that you listed, they are safety critical. I mean, medical devices, they simply can't fail. Airplanes, automobiles, we all expect them to adhere to safety standards and to be very reliable in use. So, major trends in these industries are that we're seeing increasing regulatory compliance to help ensure that safety is maintained and delivered. And even to win contracts or to win customers, you have to adhere to those compliance requirements and prove over and over again that you're developing smarter products that are indeed safe. At the same time we're seeing a rapid increase in software in products. This is great because it's helping companies to be more innovative, provide more differentiation in their products rapidly, deliver more customer value and be responsive to customer needs. But this is causing, along with other things an increase in -2-

3 complexity. There's more to deal with in these products than simply mechanical parts or even adding electrical parts; now, you need to comprehend the working together of software, electronics and mechanical parts. And they must work, well, perfectly together. We're also seeing a more rapid rate of change in environments. This is coming from the global competition that's taking place across all of these industries and customer expectations that companies rise up to meet their needs. And even if on some set contracts they come up with late changes, they expect the vendors to respond. In addition, we have development environments that are very spread out globally with worldwide development teams and through suppliers and overall ecosystems that make these products and solutions possible. Not only do you have the manufacturer itself, but you also have the industries that contribute, say, the networking and the communications and the databases at the back end that they work with. So you have an overall ecosystem that's trying to deliver, again, adding to the complexity and adding to the increase in change that you have to handle. This challenges meeting those regulatory compliance requirements. But one way, of course, to do that is to look at a very full lifecycle approach. You know? You can't do this just at one stage of -3-

4 development because these changes and challenges and meeting compliance requirements takes place throughout the development cycle. And you have to continue to show complete end-to-end traceability at every stage of the lifecycle, be able to respond so that the change comes in, you know at what point in the lifecycle it may have the biggest impact, or across any of the development disciplines as they all respond and keep those mechanical, electrical and software parts all working perfectly in unison. And hence from the point of view of our customers, what we see is a strong need to have excellent systems engineering capabilities to bring this all together and elevate their embedded and real-time software development to a first-class business process along with mechanical and electrical engineering. These are some of the trends that are affecting our customers and some of the things driving what we do from IBM to address this. So, Andrew, what does IBM Rational offer to address these needs and trends that Sue just mentioned? FOSTER: Well, we've long had a great portfolio of development products within the Rational brand. And what we've done now is we've actually brought these products -4-

5 together with practices and service offerings to create complete solutions for...to meet this need that Sue quite eloquently described for managing this complexity and meeting these regulatory compliance needs. So what we have is a combination of world-class development software, best practice and services that allow our customers to actually adopt these lifecycle capabilities faster than they've ever been able to before and achieve a much greater time to value on their investment and to be able to see measured improvement at every step of that investment along the way. So Andrew, how do these solutions help customers that are trying to meet regulatory standards with their development processes -- for example, perhaps in the safety critical systems development in the aerospace or automotive sectors? FOSTER: That's a really great question. There's obviously a great need for regulatory compliance. It's a really high priority right now, as Sue pointed out, across many industries. And product developers are really trying to balance a market need for improved product capability and increased complexity against the increasing needs for very demonstrable diligence across these standards, particularly when regarding safety. -5-

6 This is something that we see come out very, very strongly, particularly in the automotive and aerospace sectors. Rational Solutions for Systems and Software Engineering now actually includes practices that are specifically designed to support the needs of some of these standards. In particular the needs of the aerospace standard DO-178B. Anyone who's worked in the aerospace sector will be very familiar with this for developing software that's used in a safety critical environment. We have practices and process templates that are aligned with the needs of DO-178B and give you a great head start when building your new development environment. In the automotive sector, there equivalent to that around functional safety is the standard ISO 26262, which is an emerging standard that is of great interest to many of our larger automotive clients and right across the automotive supply chain. What we're finding is that by our clients adopting the solutions that include these practices it's giving them a great advantage over their competition when it comes to actually qualifying their development processes and their development environments. So it really is a great differentiator to adopt these solutions. -6-

7 Andrew, what about addressing challenges in other industries, like electronics? FOSTER: Well, we're working really hard to try and ensure that the solutions that we develop meet the needs of a wide range of industries. And in particular for electronics, the biggest challenge that we see right now and actually trying to ensure that we maintain effective collaboration between the hardware and software domains whilst they're trying to manage this increasing complexity. So what Rational has done is we've developed a solution, again, including best practices that actually provides a very efficient hardware, software co-design paradigm that can be maintained even as the complexity continues to rise. But that's really how we address the needs of the electronics industry. And so our last question today. Can you tell us how customers can learn more about these solutions? GREEN: There are many ways they can learn more. We have a number of things on the Web. We have live events around the country and around the world. And we have a number of papers and things available to our customers through the various meetings or interactions they may have -7-

8 with the industry and with IBM. One way to find out about these is you could just Google IBM Rational Workbench. That will actually bring up the solution that we offer for systems and software engineering. Or you can Google IBM Rational Electronic, IBM Rational Aerospace and Defense or just A&D or IBM Rational Automotive. And you'll go right to pages that talk about our solutions and highlight how we help meet these compliance requirements. In addition, we just did a Webcast that will help talk about some of the more recent offerings we have with our solution, and in particular those that help address compliance needs and safety critical needs. It's called Six Steps to Conquering Complexity and Creating Smarter products. Once again, if you do a Web search on Six Steps to Conquering Complexity, that's about enough to find parts of that. We'll post it on the Web site, too. And we have the live symposiums. We actually call it symposium since we call other things conferences and so forth. If you do a Web search on IBM Rational Symposiums, you'll see a link to our IBM Rational Symposiums for Systems and Software Engineering. -8-

9 Which, we usually do these for a full day with workshops on either side. They're free. There's multiple tracks and there's industry discussions in each of those, as well as the overall solutions. There's quite a few ways and we hope that you visit a few of those. Excellent Sue. Those are some great ways to look. So Sue and Andrew, thank you so much for sharing your time today. Great discussion. We really appreciate it. That was IBM's Sue Green and Andrew Foster discussing what's new in solutions for building smarter products and systems, new systems engineering and embedded software solutions for electronics, automotives, aerospace and defense industries. To share this podcast with your colleagues or if you're interested in more podcasts like this one, check out the Rational Talks To You podcast page at And to help you get started, we'll post a link to the Webcast that Sue just mentioned. I'll repeat the title, Six Steps to Conquering Complexity and Creating Smarter Products. And this Webcast highlights new solution features in the Rational Solution for Systems and Software Engineering. This has been an IBM podcast. I'm Angelique Matheny. Thanks for listing. Keep tuning in as Rational Talks to You. -9-

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