Rational Straddles Java and .NET (Continued)
Still Faithful to .NET Customers?
Q: Belated congratulations on the IBM acquisition, Mike. It's been quite a few years in the making; I first visited Rational when doing articles on Ada in the early '80s.
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.
Back to top
|
Introduction
