IBM and SAP to develop joint software
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Services and software companies IBM  and SAP , longtime technology partners, will bring out their first joint software product in the fourth quarter of this year, the two companies said on Monday.
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The Atlantic project will allow users to access SAP's Business Suite through IBM's Lotus Notes.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. plan to release a jointly developed product in July as part of an expansion of their existing alliance around telecommunications network management and service assurance, the companies said Thursday. The new offering, Cisco Assurance Management Solution, integrates Cisco's Active Network Abstraction (ANA) device management and mediation technology with IBM's Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus and Netcool/Precision management software, according to Alan Ganek, chief technology officer, IBM Tivoli Software. The vendors have been working on the product for about a year, he said. Ganek's hopeful that the new product will appeal not only to telecom carriers but also to large enterprises such as financial services providers that are looking for a simpler way to manage their heterogenous networks. IBM does have "very high expectations" about the likely revenue the codeveloped product might generate, Ganek said, though he declined to name a figure. IBM and Cisco also didn't provide any financial details about their expanded relationship. "IBM's overall partnership with Cisco has largely been around the services area," Ganek said. "This new one really gets into our development teams in the software world." IBM and Cisco struck a broad-based strategic alliance back in 1999 and in recent months have been collaborating on multiple fronts including an expansion of their unified communications partnership and a combined cooperative support offering. The first version of Cisco Assurance Management Solution will offer features including network fault monitoring, trouble isolation and real-time service-level event management. Future versions of the software will include more of IBM's Tivoli systems and network management technology, Ganek said. The next natural additions would be the Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database and Tivoli Monitoring, he added. Over the long term, new releases of Cisco Assurance Management Solution could also include technology IBM acquired from the purchase of network performance monitoring software company Vallent, Ganek said. IBM closed the purchase of Vallent in February and the software became part of its Tivoli business unit. IBM gained access to the Netcool software after buying network management specialist Micromuse in February 2006. It's also possible that IBM and Cisco may release other jointly developed software, he added. Ganek stressed that the IBM/Cisco relationship isn't exclusive and that IBM also has "great relationships" working closely with most of the other network equipment providers. Cisco's ANA already interoperates with other members of the Tivoli family including Tivoli Netcool/Impact and Tivoli Business Service Manager. Cisco has been rebranding IBM's Tivoli Netcool as Cisco Info Center for some time and it's being used by more than 500 of its customers. Â
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IBM Corp. said Monday it will release as open source code some of its software for speech-enabling applications. The move is intended to spur development in the field and outflank rivals by making IBM's free technology the industry standard.
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Executives at IBM's Rational Software unit outlined plans to add Web 2.0 and collaboration technologies to its line of development tools.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM will begin delivering on its Jazz vision for collaborative application development Monday with the introduction of collaborative portal software intended to boost team productivity. Called IBM Rational Team Concert, the software is one of a series of product and program introductions planned for the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2007 event in Orlando, Fla. IBM also will expand its Jazz.net Web site to enable users to check out Jazz-related projects and offer input. The Jazz Project focuses on collaboration across geographic boundaries and is based on Eclipse technology. With Team Concert, which currently is in a beta form, IBM is producing a portal optimized for agile development teams in mid- and large-sized businesses. IBM plans a family of Concert offerings and extensions to existing IBM products geared toward collaborative, team-based development. "It's a real-time, collaborative portal for improving the productivity and innovation of software delivery teams," said Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM Rational. Developers using Team Concert can collaborate in real time based on the context of the work they are doing. For example, if a requirement were changed, other developers would automatically be notified of the change, Hebner said. "[The change] would automatically show up in the code," he said. "It's more real-time linkage of the artifacts." Instant messaging capabilities will be featured in Team Concert. To bolster real-time collaboration, IBM will offer adapters to tie Team Concert to IBM's ClearCase source code management tool and the ClearQuest work item manager. Developers and customers can participate in the development of Team Concert through Jazz.net, Hebner said. General availability for Team Concert is set for the first half of 2008. With Jazz.net, IBM is expanding access to Jazz technology beyond the dozen or so customers who have had it so far. "We're opening up the Jazz.net community to Rational customers so they can get access to the technology," Hebner said. "We're going to be developing the products in a more open and transparent fashion." At the conference, IBM also will unveil "incubator" technologies based on Jazz that are focused on agile development. Incubator offerings are prototype technologies that may or may not become products; they will be offered for such purposes as story authoring, which is an agile development concept in which software projects are described in an evolving story format rather than relying on format requirements management. Incubators also are planned for team reporting, code analysis, and process authoring.Â  IBM describes Jazz as falling into the domain of ALM (application lifecycle management) 2.0, which features agility and greater flexibility. The company believes the open forum approach to its Jazz Project is different than what ALM rival Borland Software is doing, Hebner said. Borland also lacks infrastructure to bolster geographically distributed development, he claimed. HP's Mercury technology, meanwhile, does not offer a development environment, he said. An analyst expressed high hopes for IBM's efforts. "I am very bullish on Jazz," said Carey Schwaber, senior analyst at Forrester. "What Jazz does is gives you one interface to all the data about the project," Schwaber said "I think this is an opportunity for IBM to really re-take market leadership in the development tool space," said Schwaber. With its collaboration capabilities, Jazz is offering what Borland seeks to provide, Schwaber said. Mercury, meanwhile, has focused on bookending the development process with requirements management and testing but has not done much in ALM, she said. Also at the conference, IBM plans to announce products to support collaboration by geographically distributed development teams. Featured is Web-centric, lower-bandwidth software to reduce overhead costs of deploying clients. As part of this effort, IBM is announcing availability of IBM Rational Asset Manager, which provides intelligence into software assets and how they are consumed in a collaborative environment, on June 29. The Asset Manager software features a registry of design and development assets, such as codes, patterns, and tests. Organizations can reduce cost and time and communicate across disparate global teams. Also at the conference, IBM is unveiling version 7.01 of IBM Rational ClearCase. This product helps isolate data based on the location of a user, which can be critical in cases where a user is in a country with export controls preventing work on certain aspects of code. IBM also has built a plug-in focused on geographically distributed development teams for IBM Rational Composer 7.2. The Composer offering features a process helping developers deliver customized, consistent software development projects. Development teams from the IBM Lab in Bangalore, India, meanwhile, have published a Redbook entitled "Global Development and Delivery in Practice: Experiences of the Rational India Lab." The material, accessible here, covers common challenges in geographically distributed development environments and the steps IBM took to tailor Rational tools to solve these problems.SEE ALSO:IBM advancing global-based software developmentIBM Jazz-ing up collaboration
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Convergence CT today announced an agreement to jointly market clinical data warehousing products for the healthcare and life sciences industries.
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IBM and Cisco are releasing a jointly developed telecommunications network management and service assurance product.
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The combination of PeopleSoft applications with Oracle&#39;s database and middleware products could lead to a closer relationship between IBM and SAP.
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SAP and Business Objects have announced the first joint products from their merger, although the planned tight integration of the companies&#39; software will take longer to achieve.SAP agreed to pay $6.8 billion for the business intelligence vendor in October. It has now secured more than 87 percent of Business Objects&#39; shares, more than enough to control the company, CEO Henning Kagermann said at a press conference on Wednesday.Business Objects is now a division of SAP led by its former CEO, John Schwarz. The plan is to integrate its analytics technology more tightly with SAP&#39;s business applications, but also to keep selling standalone products that work with other vendors&#39; software.&quot;While we&#39;ll clearly align ourselves to SAP, we are equally committed to non-SAP customers, platforms and environments,&quot; Schwarz said. &quot;Our intention is to have a business intelligence solution on top of Oracle that&#39;s better than Oracle&#39;s own business intelligence solution.&quot;The companies announced nine software packages that will go on sale this month and combine products from Business Objects and SAP. They include Financial Performance Management, Governance, Risk and Compliance, and Visualization and Reporting.The financial package, for example, includes strategy management and planning tools from SAP and financial consolidation and profit management tools from Business Objects, said Doug Merrit, the head of SAP&#39;s Business User division.Those products were already sold separately, and the packages don&#39;t involve any significant integration work. They are intended to give the companies&#39; sales teams something to go out and sell -- although customers should also see a pricing benefit compared with buying the products separately, Schwarz said.The long-term goal is to integrate the companies&#39; software more tightly to form what Kagermann called a &quot;closed loop.&quot; The idea is that SAP users, acting on information from Business Objects&#39; analytics tools, will be able to more quickly adjust underlying business processes running in SAP Netweaver, Kagermann said.SAP will also offer Business Objects&#39; tools as part of its new suite of on-demand business applications for medium-sized enterprises, called Business ByDesign. The team developing Business ByDesign &quot;will be able to pick the best from the Business Objects portfolio and merge it into Business ByDesign,&quot; Kagermann said.Business Objects already offered its products on demand and had 70,000 subscribers at the time of the acquisition, Schwarz said. The job of merging the BI tools into Business ByDesign has not yet started, however, he said.Business ByDesign is still very new. SAP aimed to have about 100 customers live on the system by the end of 2007, a modest target, and its goal for 2008 is &quot;to prove that we can build a profitable volume business,&quot; Kagermann said.SAP&#39;s news coincided with the announcement from its biggest rival,&#160;Oracle, that it reached a deal to buy middleware vendor BEA Systems for $8.5 billion.BEA is in a different business from Business Objects, but Oracle&#39;s move to expand itself further through another big acquisition only helps to validate SAP&#39;s decision to acquire Business Objects. It was the biggest deal in SAP&#39;s history and broke the vendor&#39;s tradition of not acquiring large companies.SAP bought Business Objects for its technology, not its customers, Kagermann said Wednesday, although he sounded pleased about the new customers that SAP will gain.&quot;After you eliminate the joint customers, we&#39;ll have by far the largest installed customer base in the world. There will be probably more than 60,000 customers using one of our products,&quot; he said.Asked about the BEA deal, Kagermann seemed reluctant to be drawn away from discussing SAP&#39;s own merger, but he did take a quick jab at his rival.&quot;So far we are competing very successfully in the market,&quot; he said. &quot;I was a bit surprised [by the BEA acquisition] because Oracle has said they are the leading technology company, and now they are acquiring technology, which is interesting to me.&quot;SAP Deputy CEO Leo Apotheker was more outspoken. &quot;He has to pay more and more for less and less,&quot; he said after the press conference, referring to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. BEA is &quot;not really that big,&quot; he said.Kagermann reiterated that SAP&#39;s strategy is to grow its core businesses -- applications and middleware -- organically, but it won&#39;t rule out another big acquisition to strengthen the company in a new market.
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Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday plans to make available a connector kit that allows users to easily link Microsoft's Office Project Server 2003 with SAP AG's ERP (enterprise resource planning) products.
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InfoWorld - IBM&#160;hopes to bring BI to a wider audience of midmarket customers with a new software stack developed in partnership with Business Objects SA, industry sources said.
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PeopleSoft will bundle its future business applications with IBM&#39;s infrastructure software as part of a billion-dollar technology and marketing agreement between the two companies.
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InfoWorld - IBM Rational on Wednesday plans to flesh out complete plans for the upcoming IBM Software Development Platform, code-named &#8220;Atlantic.&#8221;
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Jeskell, Inc. a Premier IBM Business Partner announced today an  expansion of its Professional Services portfolio to include enterprise  scale applications from SAP configured and priced for the small and  medium size businesses.
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The new initiative will automate and simplify the process for independent software vendors to become IBM business partners, according to a statement.
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IBM Corp. is enhancing its software developer&#39;s support program by creating a software code exchange.