Over the next year, IBM will transform its plethora of Rational Software and WebSphere Studio development tools into a single, standards-based platform. The company's efforts will have far-reaching implications for its customers and the development tool market.
When IBM purchased Rational Software over a year ago, it acquired a vendor whose tools support and largely complement the WebSphere Studio product family. While WebSphere Studio excels at code development, Rational's tools handle lifecycle management tasks such as requirements collection, application modeling, and testing. However, the two product families overlap in some areas. For instance, Rational Rapid Developer allows developers to generate Java code using visual modeling methodologies, a capability that is also available in WebSphere Studio. Such functional overlaps--not to mention the daunting number of ways to integrate Rational and WebSphere Studio tools--have generated considerable confusion among developers.
To reduce this confusion and make its tools more appealing to developers, IBM will take several actions to integrate the WebSphere Studio and Rational product lines during 2004:
- Consolidate tools to a single development environment. Last month, IBM revealed that it is creating a tool architecture that it calls the Software Development Platform (SDP). The SDP, which will be based on the Eclipse open-source development framework, will be the consolidation point for all WebSphere Studio and Rational tools. Like Eclipse, the SDP will utilize open interfaces that allow Rational, WebSphere Studio, and third-party tools to plug into the platform in a consistent manner.
- Put Rational Software in complete charge of tool strategy. When IBM unveiled the SDP last month, it also turned over responsibility for the WebSphere Studio tool family to Rational Software. As part of the move, IBM transferred 400 internal staff members from the WebSphere Studio group to the Rational division. As a consequence, Rational Software is now in full control of IBM's development tools and the SDP strategy.
- Unite the WebSphere and Rational developer communities. This year, IBM will host an event that combines its developerWorks Technical Conference with the Rational User Conference. This will pave the way for tighter integration between the two developer communities. IBM has also consolidated its various Internet properties for developers into a revamped developerWorks site.
As IBM takes these steps over the next year, significant changes will take place in the company's development tools. While some Rational tools and capabilities will appear in WebSphere Studio, some WebSphere components will surface in Rational tool packages. As part of the consolidation process, Rational Software will combine some tools and change how they are packaged with each other. Integration levels between tools will increase, and integration methods will become more consistent. These changes will affect all WebSphere Studio toolkits, including WebSphere Development Studio for iSeries.
At this time, IBM and Rational Software are not revealing any specifics about what tools they will consolidate and how they will repackage them. What is clear is that the Eclipse framework will be the basis for the SDP and that developers who understand Eclipse will be in the best position to work with the resulting toolsets.
The Competitive Fallout
While IBM's SDP will be a welcome change for many WebSphere developers, it raises fresh concerns among other tool vendors whose customers use Rational Software's products. For years, Rational's tools have supported multiple development environments. However, as Rational tightly integrates its tools with WebSphere Studio, IBM competitors such as BEA, Borland, and Microsoft expect Rational to reduce its commitment to their development platforms. This expectation was a big factor in Borland's acquisition of Starbase and TogetherSoft, two of Rational's competitors. The same expectation recently led BEA to forge an alliance with Compuware. Meanwhile, Microsoft intends to enhance many of its lifecycle support tools in the upcoming "Whidbey" release of Visual Studio.NET.
I am not among those analysts who expect Rational Software to abandon its partnerships with these vendors. Indeed, I expect that Rational will continue to declare its support for non-IBM development environments. However, I also expect that over time, developers will find that Rational tools integrate better with WebSphere Studio than with competitive development environments. At the same time, IBM's competitors will develop their own modeling and management tools to entice customers away from Rational. As a result, Rational's non-IBM partnerships will gradually deteriorate as the parties to these alliances find they have a shrinking number of common interests.
In short, the application development market is about to change from one in which lifecycle management tools support multiple development environments to one in which those tools are "optimized" for individual environments. As this change occurs, many tool vendors will be acquired or put out of business, and their tools will be consolidated into competing platforms. As a result, programmers will face a growing number of strategic decisions about the development environments and toolsets they use.
Lee Kroon is a Senior Industry Analyst for Andrews Consulting Group, a firm that helps mid-sized companies manage business transformation through technology. You can reach him at
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