Welcome to this IBM Rational podcast. I'm. Kimberly Gist with IBM. Is your software delivery process

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1 IBM Podcast [ MUSIC ] GIST: Welcome to this IBM Rational podcast. I'm Kimberly Gist with IBM. Is your software delivery process too expensive and too time consuming? Does it provide poor visibility across distributed teams? There is a solution: the IBM Rational software solutions available on the cloud offer an agile, flexible cloud-computing model helping you simplify and streamline your operation so delivery teams can work faster no matter where they are. Today, Steve Weaver, Rational Cloud Marketing Manager and Steve Huntington, Cloud Offerings Product Manager join us to discuss these solutions and provide some helpful insights. Steve Weaver and Steve Huntington, welcome to the podcast. Steve Weaver, I'll turn it over to you. Okay. Thanks, Kimberly. Let's get started. So Steve, first question. What are some of the problems that organizations typically see when they have large globally distributed software delivery teams? HUNTINGTON: Hey, Steve. Thank you. It's great to be here. -1-

2 I think the first thing to recognize is development and test is an inherently difficult process, regardless of where your team is located. There's lots of moving parts and there's many stakeholders besides your own development team. You have generally contractors, sometimes business partners or even your clients who are participating in the process. All of this adds up in to an ultimately complex and often expensive effort to move forward with. When you add the global nature into this, besides the complexity of different time zones and the different cultures from the people involved, you're adding many different sites, connectivity problems, decisions to be made in your IT environment as to how you're going to deploy your systems and your overall environment. This further stresses any information silos that you have, any processes that you have that are not properly tuned and appropriate for the globally distributed team. And ultimately makes change and management of that change and the ability to communicate and execute among the team members much more difficult. And today I'm sure as we all know, we're all doing this with smaller budgets, generally starting to shrink the teams, and yet with higher expectations for the amount of innovation -2-

3 that the teams need to deliver and the speed that they need to deliver it at. The end result is these realities are not addressed by the development team. They can often stall the software delivery effort and the innovation effort of your team. Thanks, Steve. So cloud computing has obviously been getting quite a lot of hype over the last couple of years. What are some of the benefits that cloud computing can potentially bring to the software delivery lifecycle? HUNTINGTON: Well for Rational, we provide a solution to help bring these globally distributed teams together. That capability is called the Collaborative Lifecycle Management Solution, and it's based on our Jazz technology. This capability can help integrate your processes and your information and unify your team and your projects, ultimately increasing the collaborations and therefore optimizing the delivery and overall governance of your effort. When you use this platform you provide a tremendous capability to improve the software delivery of your team. And when you use this capability on the cloud it's even better. You can further increase the speed and agility of -3-

4 your team to deliver. For instance, by using the Collaborative Lifecycle Management Solution on the cloud you can provide your team a secure and consistent deployment environment whether you have one project or many projects and you can keep that environment up and running much easier and minimize the disruptions to your development team. All of this can be done in addition to reducing the risk, the cost and complexity of installing and maintaining that environment and integrating the capabilities across the entire application lifecycle together. So by leveraging CLM on the cloud you decrease the overall IT complexity, the overall management, reduce the skill needed to manage the environment and ultimately the development team gets immediate access to the environment they need in a predictable way without delay and the ability to scale that environment up or down as they see fit. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Now, the CLM solution from Rational actually runs on IBM's Cloud Solution, which is SmartCloud Enterprise. Can you give us a little bit of an overview of what SmartCloud Enterprise actually is? -4-

5 HUNTINGTON: Sure. The SmartCloud Enterprise is IBM's public Infrastructure as a Service offering. At its core it's offering a virtual compute capability to clients that is available on demand across six data centers across the world. Using IBM's expertise and delivering computing infrastructure to clients for many years, we have established these secure virtual environments that can be accessed by the client any time and to any scale. By putting our Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management Solution into this environment, clients have access to a pre-installed and configured capability that they can spin up within a matter of minutes and has full connectivity to your teams, regardless of where they're located around the world. And still you're in complete control of this environment. By using the essentially rented infrastructure you're minimizing your data center footprint, you're minimizing the skills and complexity of deploying this hardware environment, but yet you still can deploy the capability in the configurations that you want that your development teams need and access. Okay. That certainly makes a lot of sense. So we mentioned some of the benefits of leveraging the cloud for Collaborative Lifecycle Management. What are some of -5-

6 the key use cases for CLM on the cloud that you are seeing customers beginning to use? HUNTINGTON: So you're taking it a step at a time. What we're seeing from clients is, one, just that interest of how can cloud computing help my team with their development and test. And there's a journey that is started, and usually that journey is starting with an experiment, or as we like to call the sandbox. So we're really seeing and encouraging clients just to take that first step to put up an environment on the cloud merely to do the activities that they already have to do today but are temporal in nature, such as enablement or training. Whether it be their administrators or their end users, these environments can be set up, configured, saved even, torn down and reused again. So we're seeing a lot of people leverage that environment, that sandbox [INAUDIBLE] environment as they're learning about cloud, understanding how their company's policies and procedures related to cloud are evolving and they become more comfortable with the nature of deploying these capabilities on to the cloud. From that point forward, clients generally then consider whether they want to take that implementation on premise in -6-

7 the private cloud offering or a cloud that's within their own firewall, or whether the nature of their development effort is suitable for deployment on a public cloud, such as the SmartCloud enterprise you spoke about earlier, and can be leveraged by their greater ecosystem of developers, partners and clients. From there there's been great interest into other lifecycle capabilities on the cloud including performance testing, other types of functional testing and unit testing and ultimately starting to consider deploying their product on to the cloud for consumption. But many of those for probably another conversation. But we are seeing a great interest in clients leveraging the cloud. The journey has started and it's exciting to see where it's going to go in the future. Okay. So I think one of the key benefits you mentioned there is that not only can we run the CLM products on the SmartCloud Enterprise, which is IBM's public cloud, but also if customers want they can run the CLM products on their own private side infrastructure as well and get exactly the same experience. And I think that's really important. HUNTINGTON: Absolutely. And IBM can assist and Rational can assist the clients there whether they choose to consider -7-

8 a cloud environment or a virtualized environment that they've already implemented, whether they're looking for a private cloud solution that's delivered essentially as a box or an appliance or they want to build one from scratch leveraging IBM services. Each step of the way IBM can help them in the planning, defining the choices and assessing the different implementation options available to them. Okay. Thanks, Steve. So one last question. If customers are interested in exploring CLM on the cloud, how does Rational license the CLM solution? Is it really easy for them to get started? HUNTINGTON: Absolutely. Our solutions on the cloud today leverages the same licenses the clients have already bought or are willing to consider. So we offer full license portability, whether the client chooses to deploy the CLM solution on premise traditionally, on dedicated hardware, on a private cloud or on the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise. And clients can get started by simply contacting their IBM sales rep and also ask their IBM sales rep for access to our demonstration capabilities on the cloud where they can test drive and experience the CLM solutions running on the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise before they make their purchase decision. Additionally, they can see our Web site for more information at ibm.com/rational/cloud. -8-

9 Okay. Thanks, Steve. That's a great overview of the CLM on the cloud offering. I'd like to thank you for participating today and I look forward to hearing more about Rational cloud solutions at a later date. Thanks, Steve. HUNTINGTON: My pleasure. Thank you. GIST: Thank you to both of you. A great presentation and some really valuable insight in key benefits on leveraging Rational cloud offerings and solutions. We appreciate your time and invaluable expertise on this subject. That was Steven J. Weaver, Rational Cloud and Marketing Manager and Steve Huntington, Cloud Offerings Product Manager with some valuable insight into our topic of Collaborative Lifecycle Management on the Cloud. 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. I'm your moderator, Kimberly Gist. Thank you for listening. And we hope that you will choose to keep tuning in as Rational Talks to You. IBM Podcast [ MUSIC ] [END OF SEGMENT] -9-