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Rational Straddles Java and .NET
Posted April 15, 2003
For years, Rational Software has been the acknowledged leader at the high end of the developer tools space, a key player in modeling and lifecycle management, a Switzerland collaborating closely with both Microsoft and IBM. Mike Devlin, general manager of IBM Software Group's Rational software division and formerly a co-founder and CEO of Rational Software, sat down with us in New Orleans to discuss how IBM's acquisition will impact Rational's direction, the future of enterprise-level development, Java, and .NET. Still Faithful to .NET Customers? Devlin: Ada was a good technology, but it didn't turn out to be a good market. But thank you. The merger is going quite well, better than any technology combination I've seen before. Q: The obvious first question is: Rational played Switzerland between Microsoft and IBM for years. How will being a group within IBM impact your support for .NET and your emphasis on Java? I know you have a personal message on the Rational Web site stating your commitment to supporting .NET? Devlin: That's one of the biggest questions we get from our customers. All our customers have heterogeneous environments, including .NET. We will continue to provide support for .NET across our product line. The customers are demanding it of us, and of Microsoft. They're demanding it of both of us. Some products, such as ClearCase, have a relatively narrow interface to Visual Studio in particular, so maintaining compatibility is not very demanding. I don't think we'll ever have a problem with those. Products such as testing and modeling tools do require a deeper connection. So far, Microsoft has given us the access we need and we expect to continue supporting .NET. Actions speak louder than words. Look at the investment we're making in .NET and the products we're producing for .NET. Q: Will you keep .NET versions of your tools functionally equivalent to other versions? Will the versions for different platforms vary? If so, how? Will you continue to peg Microsoft-related enhancements to your lifecycle tools to new versions of VS.NET? Devlin: Good question. The core products such as ClearCase will be largely functionally equivalent. Products in testing and modeling areas are different to the extent that the platforms are different. If you're in the Visual Studio shell, they look different from how they look in the WebSphere or Eclipse shell. So far, we've been able to keep most of the functionality equivalent. So features might appear first on the Microsoft platform, then on the others. There are differences; with Visual Studio it is important to support C#, Visual Basic, and C++, while on the WebSphere platform the emphasis is Java and C++. Q: Asking the same question in a more confrontational fashion, I know that the WebSphere group sees its job as crushing .NET? Isn't that part of your purpose in life now? Devlin: We have two purposes. As I said, our customers have heterogeneous environments. It's standard in the software group to support non-IBM products that compete with IBM products. There might be cases where working with the WebSphere team, we can bring new features to market more quickly than we can with Microsoft. But that's good because it will put pressure on Microsoft to give us those capabilities. Q: Many people associate Rational with modeling because of your leadership role there, but in fact that isn't where the majority of your sales come from. Can you talk a little about your product mix and whether that will change in the near term? Devlin: Historically, our largest product line has been change management, followed by modeling, testing, and then requirements management. The main area driving change in our configuration management tools will be expanding them to provide a single control point for managing the application during development, deployment, and testing, and also deployment and operation, by integrating with Tivoli and other products IBM has. There are some interesting opportunities there. Q: Can you be specific about how you'll integrate with Tivoli? Devlin: We'll have something to announce in the near future, but I can't say anything now. Role of Architecture in Enterprise Devlin: Part of the XDE initiative was to integrate modeling with the IDE. The developer can get the benefits of modeling without even realizing he is using modeling. Q: They start with code and that gives them a model. Devlin: Correct. They can use just as much UML as they want to visualize and communicate with their teammates. We are also expanding the value developers get from modeling. The preview we're doing this week integrates testing into the model. Test cases are generated from the model. In the high end of the market, which will drive down to the rest, we are building up industry sets of architectural sets and patterns that make it a lot easier for people to use these quickly instead of creating them themselves. An example is the telecom industry, which is already one of the broadest users of modeling, where standards are now implemented in UML 2.0. Also, we're broadening to include data modeling and business process modeling, so that will provide more value. We never expect to completely replace all handwritten code, but over time we believe we can make it a much larger percentage. Q: This is what will convert the missing 94 percent? Devlin: Yes. It will happen incrementally. It won't happen in one quarter or one year. Q: Why is architecture important in the software development process? What role does architecture play in UML and Rational Unified Process (RUP)? Devlin: If you have an architecture, it not only helps you get the product done, but the framework also helps team members coordinate the components they are developing so they actually work when you plug them together. The quality of your architecture also determines the quality of the resulting system. If you have a low-quality architecture, you can test it all you want but you won't fix the architecture in the final stages of the product. But most importantly these days, a well-designed architecture is resilient in the face of change. If you put in place the right architecture, it is relatively easy to implement new features and new capabilities. If you have the wrong architecture, it is much more expensive. Q: Discuss Rational's architectural practice. Devlin: As you would expect, our approach is driven off object orientation, component-based development, and services-based architectures—all areas we have been leaders in. IBM has a similar view of architecture and has done a good job of evolving in that direction across product lines. So, to the extent that we need to add security, we can leverage work in Tivoli; for persistence we can leverage DB2. You'll see examples of this in our next releases. Q: How will Rational leverage IBM Research? Devlin: One of the pleasant surprises in the merger is how much benefit we're getting from IBM Research. It has been doing a lot of work in our areas, which can now come to fruition. Q: We see an emerging category of Enterprise Architects within IT. How do you see the relation of software architecture to the bigger issue of enterprise architecture? How is it relevant to aligning business and technology objectives? Devlin: Very good questions. Within an enterprise there is the architecture of the different elements—the applications themselves, the data models, the database architecture, the business process modeling, and the technical modeling. The Enterprise Architect is in the position to look across all of them and capture an enterprise architecture. The EA is the reservoir of the best practices for that business—what works in this industry and for this customer. So, Enterprise Architects are the people we need to work with to extract those design patterns, or to work with to capture their best practices to customize the RUP for them. We've always recommended an architectural approach to the customer, and now the EA is professionalizing that. Q: Do you see this changing or emerging? Devlin: Yes and no. There is a shortage of good people. Also, there have been people that did this informally, but the emergence of this job function gives them the authority they didn't always have and makes the role of architecture more visible to management. Q: How can enterprises promote and maintain standard architectures while also retaining flexibility to adapt to changing business and technical conditions? Devlin: The characteristics of a well-designed architecture are that it is componentized and modular. You can't avoid change, but you can at least encapsulate those changes. There are normal benefits of encapsulation and abstraction. There will still be changes across those boundaries that alter the whole design pattern. Those will still be more expensive. What we're doing is making sure the inexpensive changes stay that way. For the larger changes, we want to at least make them well-contained so you know what the impact will be. Development Tools Directions Devlin: We were the father of that notion back in the mid-'90s when we took the strategy of acquiring the best. That meant paying a premium price, which Wall Street didn't always like until we got to the other side. We believe that we forced the hand of the rest of the industry. Customers resonated with the message that they didn't want to be forced to integrate those tools themselves and deal with compatibility, which forced other vendors to put together those suites with the second-tier products. Now, we're going beyond that with the technology preview I mentioned earlier, integrating testing and deployment. We have many years to go before we fully integrate the lifecycle. But there is another dimension: the connection between the platform and the development tools. To get full automation you need both—the integration across the lifecycle and the integration with the platform. This goes to your first question. It is clear we'll be able to do that for the Java 2 environment. What you'll see is that accelerates the automation we provide developers because we can increase both lifecycle and platform integration. Historically, we've done that for the Microsoft platform. Every indication is that we'll continue to be able to do that. I'm confident because Microsoft came to us immediately after the merger announcement in December and asked us to do a joint announcement. Q: What's your take on the emerging market for visual programming tools in the Java market? How will those impact the demand for modeling tools? Devlin: You're right that Microsoft with Visual Studio had led the market in visual development. But the Java community is getting within striking distance of the Microsoft environment in terms of having those capabilities. If you look at capabilities in WebSphere Studio 5.0 and some of the new things that are coming out, you'll see the Java world support both the hard-core Java programmer who wants to build JavaBeans or J2EE components that encapsulate business logic or some technology, as well as the more corporate developers who are perhaps less focused on technology and more focused on their business domain. These corporate developers want to build something quickly on top of Java either in Java or in something like the technology we acquired from NeuVis Inc. last year and are just showing now. That's really what Eclipse and WebSphere are all about: having a common framework to support these different kinds of users. Java and Integration Devlin: One way to deal with that is model-driven development. We see people using XDE to target multiple application servers. But there's no doubt that if you want to fully exploit the capabilities of any application server, the resulting application will run better on that application server. Q: Doesn't this repeat the issues with ANSI-SQL? If you are an Oracle developer, you write Oracle-specific code to get at important features of that RDBMS. Devlin: Your database analogy is probably appropriate. There is a lot of code that can be moved between databases, but performance-sensitive code cannot. I think you'll see a similar set of things here. But remember the standards go beyond J2EE to include topics such as SOAP. So even if a company uses two different application servers, they can still be connected because of standards for communicating between those different applications—even if they are running in different environments. About Mike Devlin His greatest accomplishment at Rational, by his own reckoning, has been building a team committed to a common mission and a common culture of customer success. In addition, he was personally responsible for forging and maintaining the company's key strategic partnerships, including those with Microsoft and IBM. Many of his ties with members of IBM's Software Group leadership team date back to between 1988 and 1991, when Rational built its core strategy around partnering with IBM. Before founding Rational with Air Force Academy classmate Paul Levy, Devlin worked on critical command and control software development projects at the USAF Satellite Control Facility. Born in 1955, he grew up near Phoenix, Ariz., where his father designed autopilots and flight control systems for Sperry Flight Control Systems (now part of Honeywell). After graduating at the top of his class from the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he earned both a B.S. in electrical engineering and a B.S. in computer science, he attended Stanford University on a National Science Foundation fellowship, earning an M.S. in computer science. Mike enjoys hunting, shooting, and weightlifting. He does not golf. Resources Rational's New Site on IBM.com |
