IBM Podcast [ MUSIC ] Welcome to this IBM Rational podcast, When All-in-One ALM Solution May Be Enough. I'm Kimberly Gist with IBM. Are you tired of vendors pushing their over-the-top ALM solutions on you? Are you fed up with having to contort the way your team naturally works to fit someone else's solution? And, are you frustrated at how much effort you are spending trying to keep multiple development tools up and running? Well, today, Bernie Coyne, Senior Technical Marketing Manager for ALM solutions at IBM, joins us to enlighten us on how a simpler, leaner approach may be all you really need. Bernie, welcome to the podcast series. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Kimberly. Glad to be here. Wonderful. Why don't we jump right into our first question? Bernie, what are you seeing out there today in terms of different ALM solutions that are available? Well, that's a great way to start, Kimberly. Hey, in fact, let me start with the acronym. ALM in -1-
software stands for Application Lifecycle Management, and it has a definition of being a continuous process of managing the life of a software application. So originally, vendors produced tools focused on discrete tasks such as a defect tracking database, a software configuration management system, a requirements management database, and so forth. The information developed by the team members was locked in these proprietary databases, and every team member had to have an account with every tool they needed to access to complete their work. So organizations sought to standardize on the team tooling but found it impossible to do so with random sets of tools. So, hence the need to provide integrations across these siloed tools emerged, and thus ALM suites were introduced to the market. And these suites helped to a degree, but the integrations proved kind of brittle and the efficiency gains didn't manifest themselves to the degree the end users really needed. So today what we see is most large vendors are saying they provide true ALM tooling solutions. However, if you look closely, most of the solutions have just continued to refine their old toolsets and add on new tooling to handle modern -2-
capabilities like agile. Unfortunately, this just makes for even more complex integrations. And Open Source solutions have grown in popularity, but since these are really independent tools, they're probably the most challenging to pull together in a cohesive ALM solution. So that's a great overview, Bernie. What would you say are the issues and concerns you're hearing from customers trying to adopt ALM. Well, I speak to many customers during a month, and what they tell me is that too many of the solutions ask them to rip and replace everything they're using now, basically throwing out their investments and the knowledge they have in those tools and investments for something unproven. And indeed, on closer inspection may notice that some of these solutions are not supported by a common platform at all and they still contain multiple back-end databases. And the overhead to support these multiple databases with their inherent multiple log-ins and learn the different user interfaces reach of these tools and then try and live with these brittle and almost often shallow integrations makes it very difficult to achieve the advertised benefits. -3-
Well, with that in mind, then, what should customers look for in an ideal ALM solution? Well, ideally, for an ALM solution, they need to look for solutions that are much more lightweight, easy to install and set up and get started with. Like mobile app development teams, for example, they want to run really lean, they want to be able to execute fast and deliver outstanding results. They do not want ALM solutions to get in their way. They want ALM solutions that make life easier for them and you know, automating the kind of drudgery task no developer wants to do and time-consuming tasks like status reporting, for example. So I think the customer should look for solutions that have all the core capabilities you need for teams and are well integrated to provide the traceability reporting that they need. And also, so they're not throwing away their investments, they should look for solutions that can leverage those existing investments -- investments in, say, things like JIRA or Subversion or Git or Hudson-Jenkins. And of course, they have to look for solutions that can grow with their needs. And they best have an open, common platform so they can plug in these expanded capabilities -4-
when they need to, or indeed even extend them with third party or their own custom extensions. Great. So we're looking for something that's lean, fast, high execution, integration, scalable, all wonderful things to take into consideration. So then, what ALM solution does IBM offer? Well, IBM offers, we like to call it an all-in-one ALM solution, and we call that product Rational Team Concert. Often you find it abbreviated just RTC. Rational Team Concert is a new generation of ALM that has been designed from scratch to be integrated and extendible right from the beginning. Industry analysts have praised it as a breakthrough product, and Forrester Research recently gave us their highest rating among all vendors in their Forrester Wave ALM report. Rational Team Concert is just a simple, single download and install, and it's based on a common and open platform we call the IBM Jazz platform. Rational Team Concert includes the abilities for agile, scrum, and traditional planning, along with task and project tracking. It has real-time dashboards that are linked to developers' execution. They have advanced source control and continuous -5-
integration. We also have Kanban task boards, burn down charts and Gantt charts to enable project resources to be used very effectively and to help you deliver higher quality software. And you can use all these built-in capabilities themselves; or, alternatively, you can plug in what you're already using, such as JIRA, Subversion, Git, Hudson-Jenkins and the like. And also, I think it's very important to note that teams that use Team Concert can work with Eclipse and Visual Studio IDEs. So, even mainframe developers can be involved with their ISPF interface. So, our all-in-one solution works for all developer platforms. And this is effectively...especially important, rather, when a team like a mobile app development team needs to mix and match technology from different platforms. You know, they might have a typical mainframe system for a system of record, and yet they want a nice flashy front end they're building in Java with Eclipse. Rational Team Concert also has a very powerful Web interface, and this provides great, easy access for team leads, project managers, business stakeholders and customers. And Team Concert also has built-in collaboration capabilities like chat and discussions and attachments. -6-
And all these can be used very effectively by teams that are distributed geographically but need to collaborate of course as if they were right next door in the same room or in the same room. And, we are so confident in our ALM solution that we offer 10 free licenses that never expire, so you can try it out and prove these capabilities out for yourself. Well, that's awesome. Now, Bernie, I know we're confident in our solution, but what if you outgrow this ALM solution or your needs are broader than what you just described? Yes, of course. I think you can outgrow everything, actually. So we can simply plug in deeper requirements management and/or quality management capabilities into the same common Jazz platform of Rational Team Concert. And in fact, we call this combined solution of all three products Collaborative Lifecycle Management. Alternatively, you can extend the Rational Team Concert solution with a wide variety of third party tools that are part of a really diverse ecosystem of integrations. So, for more product information, I encourage our listeners to visit our jazz.net community. This is a community developer site for Rational Team Concert and all our other Jazz products. So if you visit the jazz.net site, look for the Rational -7-
Team Concert link. It's very prominent on the homepage. And then you go to the Rational Team Concert product page, and you can click on the download link there to get your software and your 10 free licenses that never expire. Now, I will let you know that you do have to register for the download, but, you know, that registration gives you access to the developer forums and a lot more. And I promise you'll not be bugged with e-mails. You can also check out the extend link on the Team Concert page for an up to date list of integrations that we support, because it's always changing. And as I mentioned earlier, RTC is free for the first ten developers, and the idea is you can evaluate it on a pilot project. And these licenses do not expire, and yet they have the full functionality. And there's community support for those licenses right on jazz.net. And then when you're ready to implement RTC for a small team, we have very attractive pricing with our RTC Developer for Workgroups starter pack for 10 users that comes with complete IBM call-in support and maintenance. And then for up to 50 developer teams, we have RTC Developer for Workgroup licenses. And finally, we have enterprise licenses for when you want -8-
to scale beyond 50 developers to perhaps thousands of developers. And I'd encourage you to visit ibm.com/rational/rtc for these pricing and licensing details. Over to you, Kimberly. Well, thank you, Bernie. A great discussion on Application Lifecycle Management -- or, ALM -- solutions and what IBM is offering through Rational Team Concert to help our customers moving forward. We sincerely appreciate you joining us today to share your expertise. You're very welcome. Let me also remind our audience to visit the jazz.net community. Look for the Rational Team Concert link on the homepage and browse the information relative to your situation. In addition, Bernie also mentioned that you can visit ibm.com/rational/rtc for additional information on this specific topic. That was Bernie Coyne, Senior Technical Marketing Manager for ALM Solutions, with some key points for today's podcast event, When All-in-One ALM Solution May Be Enough. To hear this specific podcast or to browse additional topics, check out our Rational Talks to You podcast page at www.ibm.com/rational/podcasts. This has been an IBM podcast. I'm your moderator, Kimberly -9-
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] -10-