Welcome to this IBM Rational Podcast announcing. the IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution. I'm Kimberly

Transcription

1 IBM Podcast [ MUSIC ] Welcome to this IBM Rational Podcast announcing the IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution. I'm Kimberly Gist with IBM. We believe customers will deliver better mobile applications by integrating, collaborating and optimizing the mobile development lifecycle. Today, Paridhi Verma, IBM Rational Go to Market Manager for Mobile; and Derek Baron, IBM Product Manager for IBM Rational Mobile Offerings, join us to introduce our new offering which provides the only comprehensive Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution currently in the market combining ALM and MAP tooling. Paridhi and Derek, welcome to the Podcast series. Thank you for joining us today. Let's get started with our first question. We're looking forward to your discussion. Well, Paridhi, IBM recently announced a new mobile development offering. Can you summarize for our listeners? VERMA: Yes. Of course, Kimberly. On October 30, IBM announced a new solution called the IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution. This basically combines the IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management Solution with -1-

2 IBM Worklight into a single offering for mobile application development teams. This is a team unifying platform with lifecycle process and tool support to build multi platform mobile applications. Well, that sounds great. Derek, who would you say is a target audience for this new offering? BARON: Yes, thank you. And we have targeted this product at mobile development teams who need to scale from practitioners to teams of people working together. So, if you work for a company, for example, building mobile applications, it's very likely that you're targeting multiple device platforms and you have an Agile team of people working together to do it. And therein lies two very fundamental challenges: first of all, how do you enable a team of people working closely together; and then, how do they collaboratively develop for multiple device platforms? I just read a study of Fortune 500 companies, and mobile is ranked as technology most likely to impact competitive advantage in the marketplace. So, whether you are a small business with a very small mobile team, or perhaps a larger organization trying to be more agile and work in the context of a large corporation, our new IBM Mobile Development -2-

3 Lifecycle Solution can help you. Right. Derek, and I agree, mobile has really taken off. So this is targeted at companies building mobile applications for their customers and employees. What are some of the challenges that they will face in the future? BARON: Well, you know, we hear about a lot of challenges. So I think I'll just share with you some of the patterns that we see, some of the recurring challenges that we hear about over and over again as we're working with our customers. And I'll just share three of them, the three biggest ones that we're dealing with and that really drove a lot of this solution. The first thing, and oftentimes first in mind, is dealing with the fact that you have to develop for multiple device platforms. You know, when you're creating a mobile application, you might be creating it for an Apple ios platform with various form factors, as well as Android-based phones. So what you have is a very highly fragmented set of mobile devices to deal with, and unfortunately the native programming models are not portable across devices. So what we're providing our the development support, the cross-platform code and build using the IBM Worklight that -3-

4 Paridhi mentioned earlier, combined with our team-based collaboration, the Rational Team Concert and our Collaborative Lifecycle Management. So that's kind of the big first one that people think about. The one that usually people express next is the challenge of these mobile applications not operating just solely on the device. So in other words, when you build a mobile application, it works on the device, of course, but when you're a company building a mobile application, it has to connect into the back end systems. This is where they exchange data. They have to do this securely and efficiently. So in some cases these programs need to be re-factored -- you know, the back end systems -- to be consumable from these mobile applications. And in doing that, you have to bridge the different teams -- the teams that build back end systems with the teams that build front end systems -- because these are worked on separately very often. So we're helping customers improve collaboration across these teams and extending their enterprise assets with things like Worklight adapters which are part of our solution. The last challenge that I'll touch on is one that is critical, but oftentimes a little bit less obvious. It's one that we sometimes discover actually as customers start -4-

5 getting ramped up on mobile development. And this is a fundamental issue that release cycles and how quickly you can develop these mobile applications is oftentimes slow, too slow. It takes too long and cost too much to develop these mobile applications. And so, one thing about mobile that's very important is that you have to be able to respond to feedback and market changes very, very quickly. So delivering and maintaining a five-star mobile app is really all about speed and quality and doing those two things at the same time, which is very hard to do. So our approach is to use Agile processes with real-time planning and in-context collaboration to help the team of people work together to deliver a solution. And these imperatives are built into our software, and that's what we try to automate to help customers deliver these mobile applications with both speed and quality at the same time. Well, thank you Derek. That's a great summary of some of the challenges that customers will face. So Paridhi, our last question is for you: where can our clients find information on getting started? VERMA: Thanks, Kimberly. So they can visit the mobile web page at ibm.co/ibm-mobile. I'll repeat again, -5-

6 ibm.co/ibm-mobile, where they can find information including white papers, solution briefs, webcast replays and other relevant assets to get started. And they can also join the conversation with a subject manner experts on the mobile frontier blog, and the URL for that blog is ibm.co/mobile-frontier-blog. I'll repeat that again, ibm.co/mobile-frontier-blog. Well, great. Thank you, Pardihi and Derek, a great discussion on the mobile industry, the challenges some customers might face, developments and the solutions that IBM has to offer. We sincerely appreciate your joining us to share your time and expertise with us today. VERMA: Thanks, Kimberly. That was Paridhi Verma, IBM Rational Go to Market Manager for Mobile and Derek Baron, IBM Products Manager for IBM Rational Mobile Offerings, joining us today with an interesting discussion on our topic, announcing the IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution. We invite our listeners to visit the mobile web page and the Mobile Frontier blog that Paridhi mentioned earlier in the podcast. We'll make sure that those links are available to you where you downloaded this event. -6-

7 To hear this specific broadcast 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] -7-