Transcript of BriefingsDirect Podcast on IBM's Upcoming Jazz Collaborative Development Framework

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect[TM/SM] podcast with host Dana Gardner, recorded April 24, 2007.

Listen to the podcast here.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today, a podcast discussion about application lifecycle management (ALM), collaboration, and the productivity of developers in teams. We are going to be discussing an upcoming product announcement -- perhaps maybe we should call it a community announcement -- by the IBM Rational Software division.

They are going to be announcing in June at their Rational Developer Conference in Orlando, Fla., a technology set called "Jazz." And here to tell us more about it and describe the benefits and issues around new collaborative approaches to development is Scott Hebner, the vice president for marketing and strategy for IBM Rational Software. Welcome to the show, Scott.

Scott Hebner: Thank you, Dana, glad to be here.

Gardner: First, collaboration has always been dicey issue with developers. There is a tension between individuals and small teams, and then groups of small teams, and then many groups of teams. What is the problem set that we are really addressing here with Jazz?

Hebner: Well, first of all, Jazz should be really thought of as a project to drive technology innovation in the whole space of collaborative, process-driven software engineering. It is a project that’s being managed by Rational in partnership with the IBM Research division to try some really deep innovation. We want to put some deep thought into the whole notion of how to help teams that are delivering software be more effective. And increasingly we will be opening up that technology project into an open community that more and more of our business partners and our customers and developers in general that can participate in.

In a nutshell, what Jazz is really all about is how to drive greater efficiencies, cost savings, and the ability to deliver software more effectively -- particularly in a world that’s becoming increasingly geographically diverse, increasingly modular. As customers move to things like services oriented architecture (SOA), it just drives the need to enhance the ability for teams to collaborate and gain access to the real-time information on the health of the project.

We're seeking to integrate the various services involved in managing the lifecycles of these projects. It's an evolution, but a profound one -- given where we are today.

Gardner: So we are describing this in terms of a community approach, a framework? Are there going to be contributions and plug-ins, something like Eclipse? Should we be looking at the Eclipse framework and foundation as a model for this?

Hebner: Yes, actually, I would. What is Jazz? I think maybe a good place to start would be there.

As I've said before, it is a major investment by IBM to create an innovative, collaborative software development technology base. It will not only will drive the evolution of our product for future years, but it’s also going to drive the evolution of many elements of the marketplace.

Another way of looking at it is Jazz is a market accelerator that will help customers implement some of the key trends that we see them moving toward. That includes the ability to manage software delivery more effectively, to leverage the supply chain, and to more effectively use software that’s being used to create and deliver software. You need a whole notion of community, modularity and empowerment to the path of a governance model.

To your point, I would think of Jazz as being the next big thing, if you will, beyond Eclipse in terms of shaping the IBM portfolio -- but also the marketplace. As you may know, Eclipse has more than two million users around the world. It's just had its fifth-year anniversary, and I think it's fair to say that the innovation behind Eclipse has really driven change in the marketplace. It has facilitated a lot of customer value in terms of the ability to integrate products within a lifecycle more effectively.

Eclipse did a lot on the client side, the user side, to integrate the desktop. You can think of Jazz as being a similar approach, but on the back end -- or the server side -- where the teams need to have the same ability to collaborate more effectively and to gain integration.

One of the more important things about Jazz is that it’s truly in the Eclipse way. In other words, if you think about Eclipse, it perhaps is one of the most successful software development projects in history. Over the last five years they have delivered really high-quality code. They have not missed a project milestone. They’ve been on time. It's a very efficient community that’s building and delivering software.

Jazz is being brought to us by the team that helped to lead Eclipse. What they are trying to do now is automate the lessons of this proven, open-collaborative model that Eclipse represents. And so I think we have learned a lot about how to facilitate collaboration. We have passive governance [to manage] a project that expands across multiple geographic locations and is always changing, is very dynamic. We are trying to "tool" that, if you will, to automate that, and take what we learned in that development project.

Gardner: Yes, we’d have to say that Eclipse has not only been successful on its own right, but has actually provided a great example, or model, for how community projects development should be done and governed.

Hebner: Exactly. I think many customers are looking at it and saying, "Well, there’s a lot of value in enhancing a community approach in how they develop and deliver the software. You can share skills more effectively, you can share assets, you can collaborate much more effectively around this model -- and gain a more open approach.

Right now such openness may be just within the company, or it may be within different departments in different locations. You know, we talk about globally diverse environments. But we should also talk about organizationally diverse environments, because more and more customers are outsourcing different elements of software delivery.

They may be testing in India. They may be outsourcing different parts of their project development. But ultimately you need to manage it all as one major project that needs to have some level of lifecycle management governance around it. And so, again, to go back to your original question, Jazz is being built from the team that brought us Eclipse. It is leveraging a lot of Eclipse technology as a foundation. If you think of Eclipse as sort of on the client, then Jazz is more on the team side of things.

Gardner: Okay. Now thinking about application lifecycle management as a topic, is that the large issue that we are addressing here? Is this really an application lifecycle management function, or is this more still of a development environment approach?

Hebner: I think it’s the broader notion of governance and lifecycle management -- service management, if you will. It focuses on how to help teams to be effective and to collaborate and to communicate more effectively. It also helps teams of teams. Right? And I think that’s where its ability to scale over time is going to be an important thing. I also think it’s something that Agile teams are really going to like. I mean it involves the whole notion of Agile development -- yet with the ability to scale.

So, in many ways, it is a lot more than software development. It’s really about team collaboration around the delivery of software. It's about lifecycle management, automating lifecycle management. It's about traceability of relationships between artifacts, automation of high-level processes, visibility into the processes and then reporting against it.

Jazz also helps to learn and deal with compliance issues, whether it's Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI), or whether it's some regulatory issue like Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. I think it deals with the notion of integration -- of real-time access to information about the project in terms of collaboration and automation. Those are the kinds of buzz words that really starts to define what the next generation of a application lifecycle management platform needs to be.

Gardner: We are also starting to hear some things in the market around software development as a service. Are there any on-demand aspects to Jazz? Or is Jazz in a position to allow for more utilization of on-demand elements within a development lifecycle?

Hebner: Well, that’s a good question, and actually an intriguing one. I think as time rolls on much of what this technology base will do for products, and the ability to facilitate collaboration -- particularly in a geographically diverse environment -- will lend itself to doing things more effectively as software as a service (SaaS).

What I mean by that is that a part of the value of this technology is going to be greater collaboration and visibility into the process of software delivery. As I said before, you may have people that are part of broader teams in different time zones, different countries. They may be in different organizations in other companies that you are outsourcing to. And you want to be able to manage that as an integrated project, gain a lifecycle view of it. Then you will be able to manage it much more effectively, to get all those geographically distributed people in the projects to actually work together.

There is going to need to be some degree of hosting and Web access around Web 2.0 clients, or Eclipse clients, or whatever it may be. And if you think about that, in many ways it’s almost an internal software-as-a-service model.

For example, perhaps you’re providing a business partner with access to some of the key software development assets of your business so they can test against it. But you only want them to have access to certain aspects of it, and you don’t necessarily need to roll out to them all of your assets. And so how do you manage them? So I think an application of this technology over time will be the ability to better facilitate software as a service models for software development.

Gardner: Interesting. And at the same time, Scott, you mentioned a little earlier SOA. And as organizations are looking not to just create individual services, but to then aggregate, composite, and orchestrate these services, is this environment something that we could take to a higher process-level as well?

Hebner: Yes. I think SOA is a key driver behind the need for this. There is no doubt, at least in our minds, that we are seeing our customer base move to SOA. I think we’re beyond the hype-curve now. It’s just a degree of how much SOA, if you will. So I think more and more customers are moving to this notion of modularity, componentization, and reuse to align more effectively the IT investments with the business imperatives. They also want to lower costs and create greater efficiencies. And they want to address labor costs by automating things more effectively. So there are a lot of benefits to SOA.

What comes with that, though, is a lot of additional modularity in the components -- the notion of a supply chain of components -- that are then used to create applications, and then a lot more change. In the old days, it used to be quite straight forward. You built the applications from top to bottom as monolithic. You did everything from testing to requirements management, pretty much contained within your team.

Now you may have a component, a service, that’s being used in an application, and that’s also being used in 10 other applications. And then one of those applications has a change request against that one service. How do you ensure that that doesn’t adversely affect the other ones? And what governance model do you have in place to govern who makes decisions on requirements and changes?

So facilitating more and more modularity also drives more and more change. How do you manage all that? I think what it comes down to is you have to work effectively as a team. You need to be able to collaborate and communicate better. You need to be able to act as a team within these processes in ways that are flexible and actually take on the unique characteristics of how the team actually works. And I think you need to integrate the various elements of the lifecycle more effectively so that you have traceability of the artifacts; so that you have the ability to manage and gain access to the assets. You need to be able to have access to the real-time health of the project based on the real work that’s going on at that particular time.

Gardner: So developers are not only going to have to manage the creation of the code, but how that code behaves in production. But there are also going to be policies, rules, and governance set up around of variety of these services. And so they’re going to have to manage, in essence, those rules?

Hebner: Well, I think there’s really no way around it when you have a governance model, and a lifecycle management set of processes and policies in place. As you begin to componentize and reuse things, you’re setting up a situation where you can have quality problems.

Gardner: So we’re going to basically have governance lifecycle management?

Hebner: Yes, and I think the governance models, the procedures, and the decision rights are going to be the overriding definition of the lifecycle processes. But, you know, governance is one of those things that developers and development teams may not like the sound of.

Gardner: They usually thought about that as happening in the operational phase, after they’ve gotten rid of it right?

Hebner: Oh, Exactly. And we think this all can be a very empowering thing for the developers in the development teams. Because if you think about it, if you’re going to automate the governance model in the lifecycle policies -- in the actual infrastructure, so that the developers in the teams don’t actually have to do anything -- it’s all being done as part of the infrastructure. And then you operationalize it, and you automate it, and it then becomes what we call "passive governance."

That’s going to take a lot of paperwork off the developers’ backs, and they’re not going to have to really pay attention too much to it because the system is automated. If you want to make a change request, or you’re taking on a change request for a particular piece of software, the system will help keep track of the paperwork, the auditing, and who made the right decisions. We'll be able to do all that on behalf of the developer.

What we’re hearing from many of our customers is that the deeper we get into this notion of passive governance it actually empowers the teams to be more effective. It gives them more time to be able to really focus on applying their skills, which in most cases is building really good software. Where you don’t automate, it then becomes a burden.

So governance does not mean paperwork and policies. I think the goal is to automate it. And that’s what I think this Jazz technology is going to help us do more and more efficiently over time -- to automate and "operationalize" how processes in lifecycle management are made to work, and to do it in a way that facilitates collaboration and communications. It’s really nice when everyone in the project has the ability to get access to real-time information about the health of the project.

Gardner: It sounds like a strategic approach to governance -- about the relationship from design time to runtime, and perhaps a feedback loop between them.

Hebner: Yeah, it’s going to facilitate that, exactly. I think Jazz is fundamentally a technology investment around facilitating three things:

• Collaboration and communications among the development team.
• The ability to have customers enact business processes for the teams that can take on the unique characteristics of how those teams are operating and need to operate, so an Agile-kind of capability.
• And thirdly it’s about an infrastructure that will help customers better integrate the various services involved in managing the lifecycle to their assets and projects.

Then how you apply that is where we get into a lot of the questions that you have.

Gardner: One of the things that is also a concern to developers is that they like to use the tools they are familiar with. They don’t like to be told what to do. Is Jazz going to be inclusive of a variety of different tools and approaches? Is this going to support the Rational products, like ClearCase and ClearQuest and RequisitePro, and also be something that you can plug in other tools and approaches to? How open should we expect this to be?

Hebner: It’s going to be very open. Just as you would go out today and become part of a community with Eclipse, you’ll be able to join and become a part of a community with Jazz. What comes with that community is access to a software development platform for actually building products -- as well as extensions, plug-ins, and processes, all based on the technology. So over a period of time, people will be able to build with partners plug-ins and products based on the Jazz technology, just like they can build based on Eclipse.

Gardner: If you do have a commercial product that you want to allow to work within this framework, can you feel free to build the modules or connectors to them, or to use what’s available in the market?

Hebner: Yes, exactly. There’ll be different degrees of this. We’re still working that out. It’s not going to be completely an open source project like Eclipse, but there are going to be key elements of that. The idea is exactly as you just said. You’ll be able to open up the parts that make sense, those that have to do with adapters and interfaces and how you communicate. We want to bridge the ecosystem of developers and partners who are building plug-ins, extensions and products based on this technology base.

By doing that, a customer that starts to leverage any products -- including commercial products -- that are being delivered based on some of this technology will be able to integrate it with other services or products built by non-IBM companies. So that’s the whole idea of it being able to integrate. Think of it as an integration of a structure. Obviously you need to have an adaptor and a plug-in capability, otherwise why are you integrating?

Gardner: One of my industry colleagues, Carey Schwaber at Forrester Research, has coined the term "ALM 2.0." And a big part of that is to be able to be inclusive, to use many tools and components across a development process, or lifecycle. And you can then gain a larger value from coordinating and managing all of that.

Hebner: This is exactly right on. This is exactly what we are referring to here. ... This is middleware, if you will, for better integrating the various services involved with how you manage the lifecycle of your projects. The whole idea of the integration bus, in layman’s terms, is the ability to plug-in different products that you may want to use as a customer that make up your software development and delivery platforms, and all the lifecycle capabilities. That’s not all going to come from IBM. We would never think that.

Another part of your question was about the IBM Rational portfolio, and I think of Jazz as being a technology innovation that we are going to use to shape the direction of our products in our portfolio for years to come. It’s going to inspire and infuse new features and functions and technology capabilities into our portfolio. So Jazz is a reason to buy ClearCase and ClearQuest, for example. It’s not -- this isn’t about replacing anything, it’s about infusing new technology and innovation. It's about the collaborative, process-driven characteristics that we talked about. So it’s an extension of the value of our current product set, and doing what Eclipse did on the client, for the teams on the back end.

Gardner: I suppose another thing has been missing in the previous one-offs and smaller monolithic approaches is analytics across the entire process. Is this coordinating effect -- even coordinating at the governance and policy and services level -- going to give us more data, more insight, more metadata into how development works well, or not well? Will it help foster a constant, iterative improvement-based approach to development?

Hebner: Yes, absolutely. That’s what I meant by the process-enactment and the access to real-time help. The idea here is that you have visibility and gain collaboration into the software development process. And so what are some of the key value points that this technology will provide to customers?

I’ll tell you. The first one is that it will enable development teams to collaborate in real time, in the context of the work they are doing, and especially in globally diverse environments. The second thing is it enables projects to be managed more effectively by providing visibility into accurate, real-time project health information, effectively drawn from the actual work that’s going on. Obviously, there is a lot of reporting that goes around that.

Building on that, it automates traceability and auditibility my managing the artifacts and/or inter-relationships -- across the lifecycle, which, as I was saying before, empowers the teams to deliver more value. So you don’t have to worry about managing auditibility issues and traceability.

The system will do it for the development teams. And, finally, I think the final key piece of value here is that Jazz provides a customizable process design enactment, a kind of capability for rules-based process guidance. It becomes a lot easier to automate, to find check points. It allows you to enact processes that take on the unique characteristics of how a team has been operating. It kind of evolves and changes and learns from what works and what doesn’t work. This is a very Agile, real-time, collaborative kind of model.

I look at it sometimes and I think, Is this going to enable a developer portal? Is it going to enable a business-process engine for software delivery in lifecycle management? Or is it an integration infrastructure for the different products and services that make up what customers think of as lifecycle management?

The truth of the matter is that it’s all three. It’s not just a portal. It’s not just a process engine. And it’s not just integration infrastructure. I think it’s really all three integrated together, optimized for software delivery in helping development teams collaborate more effectively. Again, keep in mind that Jazz is a technology infrastructure. It’s a base of technology that will then be used to infuse new capabilities, new integration and new value into our current portfolio.

Gardner: Is Jazz a project name, a code name, or is this going to be the long-term nomenclature around this?

Hebner: It’s a project name. And whoever is listening to this can go out to www.jazz.net right now, and you can see the beginnings of the community. So, www.jazz.net will be the name of the community, which is already out there. And the key formal unveiling of this, where customers and you and others can get a lot more detail, will be at the Rational Software Development Conference, the first of which is in Orlando, Fla. on June 10-14, 2007.

If anyone is interested, go out to our website at www.ibm.com/rational and you’ll get information on the conference. We are also going to be having them in India, China and Israel. And there’s a bunch of other places where we will have these events throughout the year. But come June, that’s when we are going to focus a lot more on what we are doing around visibility and collaboration in the software development process. There will be a lot more detail about what we are talking about then.

Gardner: Is this going to be in beta until it comes out in an official sense later in the year? What’s the timetable for the full, official debut?

Hebner: Well, I think you are going to start to see a lot of that articulated at the conference. But in June there will be the ability for customers to begin to get involved and get their hands on this stuff. Not only the technology and the community, but it’s likely that there are going to be betas rolling out around other new products from IBM. And obviously the details of all that, and what that all really means, is part of what we are going to be talking about at the conference.

Gardner: So there will be a series of new IBM, and I assume Rational, products that debut in conjunction with the rollout of Jazz?

Hebner: Very likely. I’d go to conference and find out, but yes, we are doing this to really enrich the value of our portfolio. So clearly there will be new products. There will be new features and functions and capabilities infused into what we have today.

This is about enriching and involving our portfolio of products that make up the Rational Software delivery dlatform into this notion, as you said before, of ALM 2.0 and collaborative, process-driven software engineering. This is the next big thing, we would like to think, in software engineering -- beyond what Eclipse delivered five years ago.

Gardner: Will there be IBM products beyond the Rational portfolio involved with Jazz?

Hebner: I think it’s likely.

Gardner: WebSphere, perhaps?

Hebner: It’s point-to-point. Well, keep in mind you have Lotus, which is all about collaboration and people-productivity, and they have Lotus Designer. So some of those things will play in this, right?

Gardner: So this could be for scripting developers, Web developers, as well as C++ and Java developers?

Hebner: Yes, it’s a team environment for managing projects and assets in facilitating communications. Part of that may be building the portal applications that you may be using Lotus Designer to do. I think your point on WebSphere is right too. And already we have some pretty good integration with WebSphere Business Modeler, and the ability to leverage that to design processes. And then from there someone has to build an architecture that allows the delivery of services to implement those processes.

So I think those linkages get enhanced over time. I think Tivoli is another important element here, in that, when we talk about lifecycle management in governance, that doesn’t stop at the delivery of the software that flows into your operational state. And many of the change requests that get created actually occur in an operational setting -- from a user, for example. Right now there is a lot of labor cost associated with getting that change into the software development process, and to the requirements.

The more we can automate that and create collaboration that extends beyond just this core software development team, the more you can address labor costs and help customers in a broader notion of managing the lifecycle of their projects. And not only in delivering productions, but also in operations. Think of it as one massive lifecycle. This is the way it should be, right?

Gardner: Compress the time from development to deployment.

Hebner: Exactly. And the labor cost associated to that, too. There is a lot of labor that goes into that hand-off, in the communications between the operational team and the development team. And you have to have the testing in the middle there. There is a lot of automation that could be done in the communications and collaboration enhancements that really can drive the bottom line for customers in terms of cost.

Gardner: Sure. Now we talked earlier about how this compares interestingly to Eclipse. It also sounds like it compares interestingly to what Java was attempting to do 10 years ago. Is there some commonality between what Java accomplished as a development framework, and what now we are talking about with Jazz?

Hebner: I think at the very high level, yes. You are onto this notion of an open infrastructure.

Gardner: Sure, automating and bringing together elements that have been very disparate and difficult to manage.

Hebner: Exactly. So we had the idea of J2EE, for example, that was facilitating Web-based transactions and an enterprise platform for building enterprise applications that, by definition, integrate with other applications across an open world, right? And the more companies that would adopt that model, and build J2EE applications, the easier it was to share skills. And it was the whole idea of an open infrastructure model, right?

Gardner: A de facto industry standard.

Hebner: Exactly. Even though it wasn’t technically open in the sense that Sun Microsystems controlled a great deal of it. But Eclipse, conceptually, was the same kind of idea. Which is, if you really want to facilitate customer ability to integrate different tools at the desktop and enhance the ability to customize them and to build an ecosystem of all these tools that are more interchangeable -- then one company could not do that. You need to have an open model. I think the same would be true with Linux, and the same would be true of Apache.

Gardner: You need to have buy-in by the people who cooperate, as well as compete.

Hebner: Yes. Our thought here is learning from those experiences over the last 10 years -- going all the way back to Linux and Java, and even prior to that. The notion here is integration of a lifecycle, collaboration and communications, particularly in globally diverse and organizationally diverse environments. By definition, if you don’t take an open approach to that you are never going to be able to integrate all of that, and to automate it. It has to be open.

Gardner: One of the other things that’s been a bugaboo for developers is the whole complexity around check-in and check-out. And developer seats. And who is a simultaneous user and who isn’t. And how you charge for use. And how you audit for that, and license for it.

How are you going to charge for something like this? And does it perhaps have some impact on managing the whole process of the payments and usage of other aspects of development?

Hebner: Well, that’s a tricky question. And I don’t have all the answers for that.

I would say a couple of things here. One would be that -- keep in mind that a lot of this value, the incarnation of the value will be in our current product set to some degree. So if I am an IBM Rational ClearCase customer right now, this is going to add value to that installation. It’s going to add additional collaborative capabilities -- sort of a collaborative developer portal that allows you to get more value out of ClearCase.

In many ways there is already a model for how you buy and pay for ClearCase, right? As I was saying before, as new things come out, though, the pricing models for those and how they work ... Well, I just am not sure that we have all the answers ready to go out on that.

Gardner: How then would someone purchase or subscribe to Jazz, or how do you expect you’ll charge for it?

Hebner: We can say that Jazz is a technology project, right? So you will be able to get access to the www.jazz.net environment. How commercial entities -- whether they be IBM or some other company out there that chooses to use the technology -- how would they decide to deliver and price commercial products that leverage the Jazz innovation and the technology? By server, by user, or simultaneous -- all those things you brought up are legitimate questions. I don’t think we have all the answers on how Jazz is going to affect all that.

Gardner: But Jazz itself is not something that you are going to charge directly for?

Hebner: As far as the community?

Gardner: Yes.

Hebner: No. That’s not the current thought. We don’t want to announce anything that we haven’t gotten to the point of rolling out. But the idea is to facilitate open community and get access to the different elements of it. We want this to be an open, commercial development expression. We want our customers to share and participate. And how we evolve and develop our products, and the key way of doing this is through www.jazz.net.

Gardner: One last question, because we are about out of time. I suppose something this large, this impactful, this strategic, needs to appeal to a variety of different constituencies -- developers should probably be enticed to it and have a buy-in element. There should be architects enticed to it in some fashion, as well as the business side. Do you expect that you can address all of these constituencies? In a quick summation, what’s in it for each of them?

Hebner: I think each one of them should keep in mind that Jazz is an innovation technology project, and that innovation would get infused across the elements of our software delivery platform, which tends to be roles-based. In your requirements management, there’s going to be additional value in that, and that’s going to help you all collaborate and communicate more effectively with other parts of your software delivery team.

If you are a developer or an architect, you are going to be able to get better real-time information with different parts of the development team that are building different elements. You can have real-time access to who's doing what. And you can have traceability. You have the ability to better manage what’s actually going on.

If you are the project manager, or the executive in charge of the effort, you are going to have greater visibility, auditibility and traceability -- what’s actually going on in the project. You can then really predict more effectively, is it going to be a 12-month project or a 13-month or a 14-month one, right? And how are you progressing against those milestones? You are going to have more improved access to the real-time health of the project and where the milestones are, right?

So I think what it’s going to do is it's going to infuse these new capabilities into a variety of different parts of the portfolio that would then appeal to different roles at a customer. I think the overriding thing is that we have to better integrate, and have all those different roles work together and collaborate in delivering software. Because obviously they all are interdependent on each other. I think most customers would tell you today that they could always improve the ability for these people to work more effectively together, for different teams to work more effectively, and share assets, and make decisions more effectively, and not get into wars over which requirements, and so forth, and so on.

Gardner: It's really about communication, isn’t it?

Hebner: It’s about communication and collaboration in a real-time environment, so that you have real-time information to make better decisions. It’s really integrating and automating. I think these are the keywords here. So, automating how these people work with each other. It’s not just communications, but it’s automating how you work together with each other, and put a little bit more predictability and management into how it all comes together.

Gardner: It sounds very exciting, very impactful, and very ambitious. I'm glad we had a chance to talk about it.

We have been discussing the new Jazz approach to software development collaboration and application lifecycle management with Scott Hebner, the vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM Rational Software. We look forward to learning more about this in the coming months, and in June at the Rational Developer Conference. And for now, people can find out more about this at www.jazz.net.

Scott, thank you very much for your time and information. I'm sure this is a subject we’ll be discussing quite a bit over the next few years.

Hebner: You bet. Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You have been listening to a BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for joining.

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Transcript of the BriefingsDirect podcast on the IBM Jazz collaborative application development and deployment framework. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2007. All rights reserved.

Transcript of BriefingsDirect Podcast on SOA and Open Source Community Development

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect[TM/SM] podcast with host Dana Gardner, recorded March 27, 2007. Podcast sponsor: IONA Technologies.

Listen to the podcast here.

Dana Gardner: Hello, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions and you are listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Today, a discussion about Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) and open-source software -- how incubation projects and the development of community-based code are a big part of the ongoing maturation of SOA. We’re specifically going to be discussing the incubation Apache CXF project. And here to help us profile and understand this project, its goals and its implications are two representatives from IONA Technologies.

First, we have Dan Kulp. Dan is a principal engineer at IONA Technologies, and he’s been concentrating on Java and Web services technologies. He is also a community lead for IONA’s open-source initiatives, and is furthermore a committer on the Maven Project for plug-ins, Apache Tuscany and Apache Yoko projects.

Also joining us is Debbie Moynihan, the director of open source programs at IONA. I want to welcome both Dan and Debbie.

Debbie Moynihan: Thank you, Dana.

Dan Kulp: Thank you.

Gardner: As we mentioned, there’s an interesting -- and perhaps unprecedented -- intersection between the maturation of SOA as a concept, a philosophy and an approach to computing, and also the role of open source in community-based development. Many times in the past, we’ve seen the commercial development of products that are spun off into open-source projects of a similar nature. But with SOA it seems that things are different. We’ve got a fairly wide variety of projects happening simultaneously as many of the commercial vendors are also putting together products, approaches, frameworks, standards and specifications to help companies develop and manage SOA.

So tell us a little bit about the playing field for open source and SOA, and particularly CXF, which is an ESB project. First let me go to Dan. We’ve seen a variety of different products out there. Why do you think it is that SOA is different from the past, and why do we have so many open source projects simultaneous with commercial products?

Kulp: The open source projects are providing a unique opportunity for developers to get their hands dirty and learn a little bit about the field, as well as contribute back some of their ideas in a form that is very healthy for new technologies like SOA. With SOA being very new, there are a lot of ideas flying around, and people are coming up with new ideas and technologies just about every day. The open-source communities that are popping up are very good places to foster those ideas and solidify them into something that’s maybe not just usable by that particular developer’s applications, but also across a wide variety of customer- and user-driven problems.

Gardner: We’re also seeing a combination of best-of-breed, more discreet components standing on their own for SOA activities, as well as more of an integrated stack or suite approach by many vendors. At the same time, we’re seeing open source and commercial. So, there’s a real mixture, a hodgepodge of code, component and infrastructure for those that are evaluating and working toward SOA. Why is that? Is it that SOA is, by definition, more of a componentized undertaking? I’ll throw this out to either Debbie or Dan.

Kulp: It definitely is. If you look at the goals of SOA, you may have some older legacy systems that you want to expose into your SOA, so that newer applications or newer development efforts can talk to those, but you also have all this new stuff that’s popping up. You have all these brand new AJAX applications and other applications that basically present a whole new set of challenges, a whole new set of connectivity options -- just a lot of technologies to connect all these things.

That’s why you see a bunch of these stacks producing different types of connectivity options. Obviously, a lot of commercial vendors are creating large stacks that are designed to target their customers with things that they have supported in the past, and obviously they have to bring their customers up to the newer technologies. When you look toward the open-source stuff, it’s more about connecting newer systems and newer technologies that are really hot and sexy today.

Gardner: So, a little bit of the old and the new -- the more the merrier.

Kulp: Exactly.

Gardner: I suppose that the good news is that it’s "the more the merrier," and there are lots of options, but I think for some people who are traditional IT folks that that many options and that much choice can be daunting and confusing. How do we look at the current landscape of best-of-breed and suites of open-source and commercial and make some sense of that?

Moynihan: Well, one of the things we're trying to do at IONA is help users with the best-of-breed SOA infrastructure technologies that are out there in open source, and to integrate those together in a certified and tested package. This makes it easier for them to leverage multiple projects together. Because there are quite a few best-of-breed approaches and there are a lot of different options. The other thing is that certain communities seem to attract SOA types of technologies, and we participate in each of those -- Apache, Eclipse Foundation, ObjectWeb, to name three of them -- and that’s a good place for people to start. I think with SOA also there are a lot of loosely coupled components, and that actually lends itself well to best-of-breed, and it allows multiple vendors to participate, with each providing what they're really good at.

Gardner: Maybe we should point out here that CXF has a certain legacy and heritage that is close to IONA. Why don’t we briefly give an overview, Debbie maybe from you, on the lineage and history of CXF?

Moynihan: Sure, about a year and a half ago IONA made a proactive decision to initiate the creation of an open-source project called Celtix in the ObjectWeb community to focus on building an open-source ESB. We got that to the first milestone and got a really good foundation. It was following along the same architectural path as IONA’s other offerings, a lightweight, standards-based approach, allowing you to lay on top of any technology that you already have in place, rather than taking a stack type of approach. At one point we wanted to grow the community. We had a lot of interest from other projects in the Apache community. And there was another project called XFire, with which we had a lot of synergies and shared goals.

That led to some discussions, and we eventually made the decision to merge XFire with Celtix and moved them over to the Apache community. We thought it made sense to start a new community with the merged project, and that evolved into CXF. Dan can go into a lot more detail about where we are with the CXF project, but we’ve taken what we had with Celtix and XFire and brought the best of both of those together. And we continue to make a lot of progress there.

Gardner: One thing I want to understand is why open source is a strong approach for the development of certain products, in this case SOA-type products. As I said, I looked at the incubator page for CXF and I see the goals are, "support for standards," "multiple transports," "bindings," "data bindings," "formats," "flexible deployment," and "support for multiple programming languages."

It seems as if, by nature, an open-source approach to SOA has advantages. A commercial vendor and private-code vendor might have some of these goals as well, but they are also going to be mindful of their heritage and their legacy. Is there, from an open-source community level, an advantage to developing an ESB, for example, in a more inclusive way -- to create an ecology, to create a community, where people will contribute? And let me throw that out to Dan.

Kulp: Oh, definitely. There’s a lot of functionality that ends up in a lot of open-source projects that really wasn’t a priority -- or even sometimes a consideration -- when those projects where originally created by the various vendors that push to get these projects started. One of the things about closed-source projects is anything that’s really developed is specific to that vendor’s customers. If their customers have various requirements, that’s what gets developed. They're trying to get new customers. That’s always a goal. But if one of their customer says, “Hey, I need this now,” a lot of other things don’t get developed.

Whereas one of the goals of an open-source community is to bring new developers in. And a lot of times those new developers have different priorities or different ideas of what an ESB should do. They can provide a lot of expertise and new and fresh ideas that can make the open-source project a bit different than closed source, and provide some unique features.

Gardner: I suppose one of the tricky parts about any private source or closed source or commercial development and requirements phases is where we draw the line. We’ve got a deadline to meet, there are only certain things we can do within that timeframe, and those are going to be dependent upon our business goals. That’s fine -- there's nothing wrong with that. But it’s a different beast when you’re developing your requirements within an open-source ecology of contributors.

Kulp: Definitely. One of the most fascinating things about the open-source community is something may not be my number-one requirement. But if it’s one of the other developer's number-one requirements, they’re more than welcome to work on it and get it done. So in my mind it would have slipped. But in his mind it would have gotten done. It’s a fascinating environment.

Gardner: I suppose it’s also a two-way street. If there’s an ecology that contributors can bring into these definitions and capabilities, they can have many more integration points, many more approaches of how this relates to different implementations in the field. That’s one direction. The other direction is that developers can say, "Listen, we want to be able to work with what this project produces -- and we happen to be of a certain flavor of development" ... like, "I am a Spring developer" or "I am a J2EE developer."

Tell us a little bit about why this makes sense for developers. They can set this project up so that they can better take advantage of what it does, right?

Kulp: Right. You bring up a good example with the Spring stuff that you just mentioned. Originally, when we were doing a lot of the Celtix stuff, we were still in ObjectWeb, and Spring wasn’t really one of our priorities. From IONA’s standpoint, it’s not something that we’ve really experienced much with our customers. But as part of the merge with XFire, that user base was a little different than the Celtix user base.

Priorities got shifted, and we started developing more flexible models for deployment that allow the use of Spring, if you’re a Spring person. If you’re not a Spring developer, we have other options that are available to deploy your applications in a very different format. That provides a lot of flexibility when you get that broad community throwing ideas out there.

Gardner: I suppose that many times, from a commercial perspective, you’ll get the vendor saying, "Here are the tools we’re going to use."

Kulp: Exactly.

Gardner: Let’s dig a little more deeply into Apache CXF. Explain what it encompasses. I referred to it earlier as an ESB, but it seems that with this expanding definition set that it might be larger than that.

Kulp: There are definitely a lot of features being added that target a variety of users and use cases that really work into our original definition of what CXF was going to be. If you take a look at that Apache incubation project page, there’s a list of stuff. It was the original design of what this project was going to be. It’s going to have multiple bindings and multiple transports. We do have that, and that’s good. But with our growing list of cool features that developers keep coming up with, we’ve been adding all these multi-deployment capabilities. We’ve been adding a lot of these new WS specs like WS-Addressing and WS-Reliable Messaging.

Some of them weren’t even really anywhere close to final specs when we started the Apache CXF project. It’s a never-ending battle of more ideas coming at us, which is great -- there are no complaints about that. But there’s definitely a lot of work to be done and a lot of new ideas. So, it’s a growing project with a growing list of features.

Gardner: So we’re getting one of those good-news, bad-news things, right? The good news is that we’ve got a lot of people interested, and they want lots of different things. The bad news is that we've got to try to address all those different things.

Kulp: Right, but being open source if we don’t have time to do something and they want to devote some resources to it we definitely welcome that.

Gardner: Who are the primary contributors and innovators within the CXF project? Obviously, we have IONA involved, but are there any others that you can share with us?

Moynihan: We also have Envoi Solutions participating. We have individuals from various Apache projects, like Geronimo, who are also contributing, because they would like to integrate their projects with CXF. At Apache it’s really more the individual versus a particular corporation.

Gardner: There seems to be quite a bit of other ancillary development in terms of Yoko, Tuscany, and ServiceMix that bring a whole other family of contributors into it. Right?

Kulp: Definitely. One of the other neat things about Apache is how many top-level projects they have. It’s in the 30s now, and a lot of the top-level projects have subprojects. So, there’s a lot of various functionality and different projects. One of the things that we’re trying to do from Apache’s success standpoint is reach out to some of those other communities, get involved with them, and help them get involved with CXF. Hopefully, we can work together to figure out the gaps that we have. Maybe we can use some of their technology, and they can use some of the CXF stuff.

That’s one of the fascinating things about Apache. There’s a lot of neat stuff there.

Gardner: Going back to that earlier point about so many choices in the marketplace today, if I am a chief technology officer or enterprise architect and I am moving toward SOA, I am going to be evaluating projects and products and looking at best-of-breed versus suite and so forth. I would want to know the flavor of CXF as an ESB? How does it fit and compare to others? What characterizes this as an ESB? Is this a high-performance or is it a low-latency? What is it designed for?

Kulp: CXF is really designed for high performance, kind of like a request-response style of interaction for one way, asynchronous messaging, and things like that. But it’s really designed for taking data in from a variety of transports and message formats, such as SOAP or just raw XML. If you bring in the Apache Yoko project, we have CORBA objects coming in off the wire. It basically processes them through the system as quickly as possible with very little memory and processing overhead. We can get it to the final destination of where that data is supposed to be, whether it’s off to another service or a user-developed code, whether it’s in JavaScript or JAX-WS/JAXB code.

That’s the goal of what the CXF runtime is -- just get that data into the form that the service needs, no matter where it came from and what format it came from in, and do that as quickly as possible.

Gardner: So, breadth, versatility, high performance -- are these adjectives that we would use here?

Kulp: Oh, definitely, yes.

Gardner: What are some others?

Kulp: Flexibility. The CXF runtime provides a lot of flexibility. We have a lot of interceptor points where core developers, who really know what they're doing, can intercept various points of that message as it’s going through the system to do some partial processing or validation. We have some work in progress to do, like partial message encryption on some of the XML stuff. That’s done via some of these flexibility touch points, where developers can just take a part of the message and say, "Okay, we are going to encrypt this." So, flexibility is another big word that’s important from a developer’s standpoint.

Gardner: So, we have this rich canvas, and we’ve got lots of different oils and paint that we can apply to it and come up with our own unique painting, if you will, for various use-case scenarios. I'm curious as to what vertical, either industries or use-case scenarios, you think that this level of flexibility and versatility is best designed for? Is this something that an ISV will gravitate to? Is this what a software-as-a-service (SaaS) organization should be looking at? If I'm a business applications systems integrator and I'm looking to pull these together in an SOA, what’s the best fit for this as it is evolving in the current incubation process?

Moynihan: Well, we've definitely seen interest from a few different types of developers and other vertical industries. IONA traditionally has had a lot of customers in telecommunications, financial services, and manufacturing. From our engineers' perspective, they bring a lot of those requirements to the project, but we have also seen interest from a lot of different industries. So I wouldn’t say it's specific to a particular industry. From a developer perspective, what’s nice about the technology is that it's really flexible, as Dan said, in that there are multiple programming models that it can apply to. Also, from a deployment perspective, if you are a developer who is implementing it, you can deploy it in a lot of different types of technology.

Whether you like Spring or you are really focused on application servers and have a deep knowledge of JBoss, you can leverage CXF within any of those types of environments. I do think there is a huge opportunity for ISVs to look at this as something that they could include within their products. That’s something that we have seen with Celtix. So definitely that will be interesting. I hope that we see a lot of people joining and providing feedback on the types of requirements we need to continue to develop for that market as well.

Gardner: I suppose the CXF project has the performance characteristics and flexibility that can be taken in a number of directions, and it’s up to the market where they want to take it.

Kulp: Exactly. Obviously the developers who are contributing have a large say in that. But, if a user is going to get more involved, we definitely encourage them to start looking at our mailing list and our Website and start providing extra suggestions of where they think we are deficient or lacking something that they need, and we’ll address it.

Gardner: I suppose that’s another benefit of open source -- you don’t have a big SKU drop to develop to. It’s an ongoing journey, right?

Kulp: Exactly. It’s not big leaps like you have in your commercial versions. They come out every six months with big leaps with them. With open source, if somebody wants to commit something today, they’re obviously able to download the source, build it themselves, and they would have a solution for themselves today. They wouldn’t have to wait two or three months for the commercial vendors to spin the whole release and do all of the stuff that's required for release.

Gardner: For those folks who now have their appetite whetted a little bit and want to learn some more as to why this might be applicable for their needs, can we get into a little bit about what’s technically going on in terms of inclusiveness and adaptation to what’s new and interesting in the market these days? There has been a lot of interest around rich Internet applications (RIAs) and Web 2.0-types of interfaces and applications. Dan, tell us a little bit about what’s going on in that direction.

Kulp: We’ve been working on some new features that we haven’t had in some of the previous generations of IONA’s SOA tool. Some of the main ones we have are the REST integrations. If you are not familiar with the Web 2.0/REST stuff, AJAX is the popular word that actually uses it. It’s a different style of interaction, where you do “gets” to get your XML data. Then it is a little bit processed on the client side, a little bit processed on the server side. There’s a lot of scripting going on in the marketplace today. There are a lot of JavaScript developers working with AJAX or doing other types of JavaScript, even on the server side. So, a lot of what we’ve done with CXF is to give those file developers some new tools to produce applications.

We’ve created a set of REST annotations. If you have existing Java services that you want to expose via REST capabilities, your AJAX clients can talk to them. You can annotate the code with these REST annotations, and CXF will pick up on them and do the REST or the SOAP interactions. We also provide support for writing your SOA applications in JavaScript. JavaScript is one of those neat interpreted things for rapid development, where you avoid some of that compile-repackage-redeploy cycle.

Gardner: It may be the most popular language in the history of development, right?

Kulp: The way the Web is today, maybe, yes. A lot of people out there are familiar with JavaScript. Having that capability built into the product opens up the project to a whole new breed of developers because we are not restricting it, saying, “Okay, you must know Java JDK 1.5 with JAX-WS."

We do support that too -- we’re not discounting that, but we’re not restricting you to that level of development. With the JavaScript capability, it’s a whole new breed of developers that this opens up to. We have some plans in place for adding things like Jython, and JRuby, and other scripting to broaden that and get more of those people in to open up the opportunities for a wider range of developers.

Gardner: How about specifications and standards? Has there been some more adaptation to what’s being asked for? I guess I’m thinking of some of the WS-* types of specs.

Kulp: Definitely. When we first started the Celtix project at ObjectWeb, JAX-WS itself and the Java API for XML Web Services, the JAX-WS 2.0 spec, wasn’t even finalized. Since then it’s been finalized, and there’s another revision coming up shortly that’s in final draft. Then there are a lot of new Web services specs such as WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Security, WS-Policy. A lot of new specifications have come out in the last year and a half that provide a standard way of doing a lot of the things that we are trying to do in CXF.

CXF is trying to use those standards whenever possible. Right now in Apache CXF we do support JAX-WS and are working on trying to get it to pass the [compliance test]. It doesn’t right now, but it’s definitely a priority. We are supporting WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Addressing and WS-Policy. We have started some discussions around WS-Context and WS-Transactions. So, there are a lot of Web service specifications that we are keeping our eyes on and following. As they evolve and finalize, we’re basically trying to get them into CXF.

Now, that said, a lot of those specifications that I just mentioned may or may not be finalized. All this Web service stuff evolves on a day-to-day basis, and it’s actually a lot of work to keep track of those. But from a user standpoint the fact that the project’s doing that, instead of the user doing it, is probably a good thing.

Gardner: Is it fair to predict that these things, when they are ready, would find themselves in CXF before they’d find themselves in commercial ESBs?

Kulp: Potentially, yes. With the commercial product there are release cycles of six months or a year, or something like that. A lot of commercial vendors try to figure out what’s going into a particular release six months before it’s even released. So if those Web services specs aren’t finalized six months before release, they may not make that release cycle. In an open-source environment, where you have a constantly evolving development, as soon as these things get finalized, it can be made available almost immediately.

Gardner: I suppose Eclipse is the most popular "belle at the ball" these days, as well as the SOA Tools project that’s going on there. What would be the relationship between what’s going with SOA Tools and Eclipse and the CXF incubation in Apache? How about to you, Debbie?

Moynihan: The SOA Tools project is geared to provide a broad spectrum of tooling based on the Eclipse platform. It provides a lot of different capabilities for building out SOA services and other types of infrastructure as well. Within that project there is a component that consists of tools that work with CXF specifically. Right now we have JAX-WS tooling, and we’ll continue to expand the tooling part of the SOA Tools project to work with the different capabilities that were built out in CXF.

What’s nice about the SOA Tools project is that it has a lot of other capabilities that are integrated -- like orchestration for BPEL, process modeling using the BPMN standard, and things like building up Service Component Architecture (SCA) tooling and other complementary capabilities; as you have talked about earlier, bringing together the best-of-breed.

Gardner: I suppose another thing we need to look at is the relationship between CXF and the IONA commercial products. I'm thinking of Artix and some of your other offerings. For those people listening who are trying to understand that, can you lay out the land in terms of the relationship between these two? What are your business goals by having such a large active role in the CXF project?

Moynihan: We would like to offer what our customers are looking for, and our customers are looking to elaborate the latest standards in open source. They also have some other needs, which are not being developed in open source. So we have a dual-strategy where we are doing open-source development and then also company-developed or commercial development. We look at both the open-source development and the commercial-development. It’s very complementary from an R&D perspective, in that we’d like to leverage the CXF technology within our commercial offerings.

Also we’d like for all of the Artix plug-ins to work with the open-source technology and to interoperate with the Artix runtime. From a development perspective, we may choose over time to move some of those capabilities into open source. We develop everything so that it can be moved into open source, if and when we decide that it makes sense.

Kulp: This comes back a lot to the flexible nature of the Apache CXF project. One of the design goals of Apache CXF, as I mentioned earlier, was to provide a lot of touch points for plugging in new functionality or to extend the system to customize a little bit. Part of what IONA is doing is using some of those touch points to provide more unique solutions for IONA-specific problems or problems that the IONA customers have been dealing with. The flexibility of Apache CXF provides a lot of capabilities to do that.

Gardner: Okay, who should be interested in CXF in terms of a deploying organization? We talked a little bit about the use-case scenarios. How do you get started, and whom would the people be to do that -- I guess a champion or a maven? Who is the decision-maker that this needs to be appealing to? And then how would those people start taking advantage of what CXF is offering?

Moynihan: What’s nice about CXF is it's small, flexible, and can be consumed in a lot of different ways. Individual developers can actually be the champions, and you see it accepted in their projects. So one group of key users would be corporate developers, people who are working within businesses and building applications and want to service-enable those. On the other end of the platform are people who want to receive and connect with those services.

If you have an application, you want to connect with these new services that are being created and that consume services. Also there are a lot of system integration firms out there who do this type of work.

Those will be the big ones. Then over time you may see more adoption of a particular standard across the organization as people learn about the flexibility and high-performance of the CXF project.

Gardner: To you, Dan ... I suppose if you are downloading an open-source component as a developer, you might be used to things a little less daunting or substantial as an ESB. Or am I reading this wrong? Perhaps there is a perception out there that needs to be adjusted, that it’s okay for me as an individual developer to download an ESB? Do you expect that to be the case? Or is this more of a larger architectural undertaking?

Kulp: It’s definitely good to be able to have a developer download it and get their hands wet immediately. Apache CXF does provide a lot of getting-started-type samples that walk you through the first steps of getting up and running as quickly as possible.

We try to provide a lot of capabilities for developers to get started very quickly with something that's simple, but at least get them started, and then from there to grow their capabilities slowly, and get them more into the advanced features. But you have to start small, and we’re trying to provide samples that will help you do that.

Gardner: That might be something that’s in the best interest of developers for their career. We're certainly seeing a lot of interest in SOA. One of the big question marks in looking at the landscape for SOA is whether there’ll be sufficient manpower or human resources for moving into the role of a SOA architect. One of the best trajectories toward that is from the developer perspective. They might have to learn a lot about a specific business, a domain, and the ins-and-outs of what’s going on in that business. But I would imagine that there are some significant career opportunities for folks who were able to take the developer role, embrace understanding of such products as CXF, and then take that into a business. Do you have any feedback on that in terms of the human resources potential?

Kulp: As in almost all cases, the more you learn, the more potential you have. So, if you can dig into various products and learn more capabilities -- with CXF supporting a bunch of the new Web services standards -- it does give you the opportunity to start using JAX-WS, WS-Addressing, WS-Reliable Messaging, and REST -- all these neat buzz words that you hear on a day-to-day basis.

For developers that aren’t familiar with these things, it does give an opportunity to learn about them and use them in something that’s relatively easy. Expanding their knowledge is always a good thing from a career perspective. The more you know, the better off you are.

Gardner: It's hard to argue with that. Well, we’ve had a good discussion on the Apache Incubator CXF project, an open-source ESB. We have been talking with two representatives from IONA technologies, Dan Kulp, principal engineer, and Debbie Moynihan, director of open-source programs.

You've been listening to a BriefingsDirect sponsored podcast. I'm your moderator and host, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening.

Listen to the podcast here.

Podcast sponsor: IONA Technologies.

Transcript of Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect podcast on SOA and open source community development. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2007. All rights reserved.

Transcript of BriefingsDirect Podcast on ALM 2.0 and Borland's Open ALM Approach to Development as a Business Process

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect[TM/SM] podcast with Dana Gardner, recorded April 3, 2007. Podcast sponsor: Borland Software.

Listen to the podcast here.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today, a sponsored podcast discussion about the development of software as a managed business process, about seeking to gain more insight, more data and metrics, and more overall visibility into application development -- regardless of the parts, the components, the platforms, or the legacy. It’s really about gaining an operational integrity view of development, from requirements through production, and bringing it all into a managed process.

To help us through this discussion of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and the future of ALM, we have with us Carey Schwaber, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. Welcome to the show, Carey.

Carey Schwaber: Thank you.

Gardner: We're also going to be talking with Brian Kilcourse. He is the CEO of the Retail Systems Alert Group, and a former senior vice-president and CIO of Longs Drug Stores. Thanks for joining, Brian.

Brian Kilcourse: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: Also joining us, an executive from Borland Software, Marc Brown. He is the vice president of product marketing. Welcome, Marc.

Marc Brown: How are you?

Gardner: Doing well, thanks. We want to talk about the "professionalism" of development. Some people have defined software development as an art or a science -- sometimes even a dark art. And to me that means a lack of visibility and understanding. Many times the business side of the house in an organization that’s doing software is a little perplexed by the process. They see what goes in as requirements, and then they see what comes out. But they often don’t understand what takes place in between.

I want to start off with you, Marc. Tell us a little bit about ALM as a concept and what Borland Software, in particular, has been doing in terms of evolving this from mystery into clarity?

Brown: Dana, that’s a great question. What Borland has been doing over the last several years is really focusing on how to help organizations transform software delivery or software development into a more managed business process. We think this is critical. If you look at most businesses today, IT organizations are expected to have very managed processes for their supply-chain systems and for their human resources systems, but when it comes to software delivery or software development, as you mentioned, there is this sense that software is some sort of an art.

We would really like to demystify this and put some rigor to the process that individuals and organizations leverage and use around software delivery. This will allow organizations to get the same predictability when they are doing software as when they are doing the other aspects of the IT organization. So our focus is really about helping organizations improve the way they do software, leveraging some core solution areas and processes -- but also providing more holistic insight of what’s going on inside of the application lifecycle.

Gardner: In January of 2007, you came out with a new take on ALM. You call it "Open ALM." I am assuming that that is opposed to "closed." What is it that’s different about Open ALM from what folks may have been used to?

Brown: Well, getting back to helping organizations with software development, it's Borland’s assertion that we need to do it in the context of how organizations themselves have developed or invested their own technology stack over time. So for us the way that we can help organizations apply more management and process-rigor to the application lifecycle is to give them insight into what’s going on. We do that through providing metrics and measurements, but in the context of their technologies, their processes, and their platforms. That is versus proposing a new solution that causes them to do a rip-and-replace across each of the vertical slices of the software development lifecycle.

Gardner: It sounds like an attempt to give the developers what they want, which is more choice over tools, new technologies -- perhaps even open-source technologies. And at the same time you give the business more visibility into the ongoing production and refinement of software. Is that a fair characterization?

Brown: It sure is. What we are all about with Open ALM is providing a platform that provides the practitioners of ALM the tools, processes, and choices they need or are skilled in, and then provide the transparency across that lifecycle to be able to collect the metrics necessary for the management team to actually manage those resources more predictably.

Gardner: Okay. My sense is that there are more options for companies when it comes to the tools and the utilities that they bring into the software development process. Let’s take a look at the state of the art of ALM. Carey Schwaber, can you give us a bit of an overview about ALM? And am I correct in assuming that there are more parts and therefore the potential for more complexity?

Schwaber: You're right. There certainly are. ALM isn't just about developers. It’s really about all the roles that come together to ensure that software meets business requirements -- from business analyst, to the architect, to the developer, to the project manager, the tester.

It just goes on and on. And it feels like every year we end up with more specialized development teams than we had the year before. Specialization is great, because it means that we have more skilled people doing jobs, but it also means that we have more functional silos. ALM is really about making sure that every one of those silos is united, that people really are marching toward the same goal -- to the same drumbeat. ALM is about helping them do that by coordinating all of their efforts.

Gardner: Are there some mega trends going on? It seems to me that offshoring, globalization, outsourcing, and business process management (BPM) add yet another layer of complexity.

Schwaber: There aren't many trends that you can’t tie back to a greater need for ALM, where we have so many things going on that are increasing the degree to which our software is componentized. SOA is just one way in which our software is more componentized. Dynamic applications are also leading toward more componentized software, and that really means that we have more pieces to manage.

So in addition to functional silos, we've also got technology silos where we have a front-end in .NET, a back-end in Java, and maybe we're using a BPM tool to create the entire composite application. There are just so many ways that this gets more and more complex. Then, in addition to managing roles, you also have to manage all of these different components and their interdependencies.

Gardner: A major component of ALM is managing complexity. You came out with a report in August of 2006 that coined the term "ALM 2.O." What did you mean by that?

Schwaber: That’s actually about something that we see as a shift in the ALM marketplace. In the past, vendors have collected ALM solutions over time by acquiring support for each role. They’d acquire a tool that supported business analysts in the work that they do. Then, they’d acquire a tool that supported testers or test leads and the work that they do. They’d integrate the two, but that integration never ended up being very good. That integration is where ALM comes in. ALM lives in coordinating the work that the tester, the business analyst, and all the other roles involved really accomplish, to make sure that software meets business needs.

What we have seen is a trend where vendors are stopping the accumulation of piece-parts of ALM solutions, and starting to design platforms for ALM that really integrate any tool that the company happens to be using with something over the platform that provides ALM almost as a service to the tools. People have the option of choosing a tool for their business analysts from one vendor, a development environment from another vendor, and a testing tool from a third vendor. They are plugging into the same ALM platform, knowing that they'll all work together to ensure that those roles are in harmony -- even if the vendors that produced the tools that support them are not in harmony.

Gardner: So even if we take a platform approach to ALM, it sounds like what you are saying is that heterogeneity -- when it comes to the moving parts of application and software development -- is no longer necessarily a liability, but if managed properly, can become an asset.

Schwaber: That is definitely one of the goals of ALM 2.0, to assume that integrating lots of different functional silos shouldn’t require that we go to a single vendor, because that’s not always possible. There may be a best-of-breed tool in a certain area that happens to be from a vendor that doesn’t have great support for the rest of the lifecycle. So the vision with ALM 2.0 is that you shouldn’t have to make that trade-off. You should be able to choose best-of-breed and integration.

Gardner: I assume then that this also affects people, IT, and process. How would an enterprise that buys into this vision get started? Do you have to attack this from all angles, or is there a more pragmatic starting point?

Schwaber: Hopefully the vendors will make it easy on you and you won’t have to buy everything in one fell swoop. The whole idea is that if you purchase one tool from a vendor that has an ALM 2.0 platform, the platform essentially comes with that. Any tools that happen to plug in to that are ones that also enable better and more flexible ALM, where the platform provides services like workflow, collaboration, reporting, and analytics. Maybe even some more infrastructure things like identity management or licensing could be in the platform, and those would be available to any tools that wanted to consume them and were designed to consume them.

Gardner: Let’s go to Brian Kilcourse. Brian, you have been in the field as a CIO. Is ALM 2.0 vision-creep or is this real-world, in terms of how you want to approach software development?

Kilcourse: It sounds very real-world to me. As most CIOs have done, I spent untold amounts of money trying to turn the software development process from an artistic activity to an engineering activity. There were a bunch of good reasons for that. One of them is that commercial computing is now over 60 years old. And one would think, at this point, that we would have figured out a way to commoditize it and make it more reliable.

But it still remains, even after this long period of time, that software development is easily the most unreliable part of the whole value delivery equation that the IT department brings to the organization. So in broad-brush strokes, it makes great sense. The other thing that is important to underline, as Carey already mentioned, is that people like me have already spent a lot of money on tools. And just because there’s a new and better definition of how to approach those tools doesn’t mean that I am going to throw everything away.

Organizations that had quite a bit of time to get these tools embedded into their practices may have silos of expertise that aren’t going to be easily displaced. All of these things argue against stopping your business while you figure out a better way to develop software. What is important is that we desperately need a way to be able to track a development from the initial conception of the requirements, all the way through to delivery, production, and beyond.

There has to be a way to do that, and it has to be an overarching process that we can observe, measure, and report on. To that end it requires that all of these tools, whatever they are, be kept in sync, so that we can understand it and we can make it evident to the business -- so that the business can know that they are getting the right value for the right dollars. That’s always one of the biggest challenges that any CIO has -- how to show value.

Gardner: I suppose there’s been a kind of tension between sufficient openness and sufficient integration, and that they play off of one another. Is there anything about the state of the art now, where reaching this balance between sufficient openness and the ability to integrate and manage, comes into some sort of a harmonic convergence? Is there anything different about ALM today?

Kilcourse: The fact that we are talking about ALM 2.0 is a big step in the right direction. In our business applications we need to be able to integrate at the information level and the data level, even if they are different code sets or physically different databases. From the business perspective we need to come up with one coherent answer to any kind of a business question. No matter what the toolsets are, we have one way to see them from a business perspective. I think that’s very encouraging.

We know from our business application stack that this is possible. So if it’s possible for the business, why isn’t it possible for the IT organization? You can call this a "cobbler’s children" problem. Why don’t we have for ourselves what we promise to deliver to our business associates?

Gardner: Let’s take that back to Marc Brown at Borland. I assume that your goals with Open ALM are similar to the goals envisioned in ALM 2.0, and that you want to help CIOs get that visibility to demonstrate value. Do you see something new and different in the marketplace now about reaching this balance between openness and integration?

Brown: You know, I do. To extend what we were just talking about, one of the core differences that organizations are talking about today versus 10 years ago is that in the past we talked a lot about making sure we had optimized role-based solutions. We talked a lot about supporting specific activities and specific roles in a lifecycle. What we are finding today when we talk about application lifecycle, and I think Carey brought this up, the real critical piece is understanding the core processes that drive the overall lifecycle activities and assets between the individuals that make up a software delivery team.

So for Borland one of the unique aspects in the way we are approaching this is that we are really focused on the process-driven integration from a technology perspective. We're really looking at the individual processes, such as portfolio and project management, where requirements definition management, understanding those processes, bringing the technologies to bear to support those processes, and providing the integrations between those individuals supports the horizontal software processes.

The other aspect is understanding that we need to do this, not just in a constrained set of tools that Borland brings to market, but also in the context of the tools that customers want to use and leverage. That means Borland technologies, other third-party technologies, and open-source technologies.

Gardner: I suppose one of the hurdles to getting this visibility in the past was that a lot of these components, tools, and testing environments have very different technologies and formats for how they apply and transfer data. What is it that Borland has done with Open ALM to allow the majority of these parts to work together? Is this about building modules and components? What does it take to get these things to actually be herded, if you can use the analogy of trying to herd cats?

Brown: The starting point is understanding that we need to deliver a platform based on an ALM meta-model, something that we can utilize and leverage to define all the various activities and assets that flow through the application lifecycle. Then we need to provide a set of core services that will use that meta-model and will support add-ons that are lacking today. One of the critical things is providing more comprehensive ALM-centric metrics and measurements that span the lifecycle -- versus being very vertically focused for a particular role and job. A lot of this is based on having an ALM data description that represents all the activities and data that are going to be passed through a lifecycle.

Gardner: So there’s an immediate tactical benefit of getting the data from the various parts, and there’s a larger strategic value of then analyzing that data, because you've got it in the holistic process-driven environment, a common environment. What sort of data and metrics do you expect companies to be able to derive from this, and how can they instantiate that back into the process?

Brown: The critical thing that businesses will be able to do is be able to demystify what software development really is. It's about removing the "black box," and having data consolidation or aggregation so they can in fact measure what’s going on. Then they can determine what areas of the processes are working, what areas potentially are bottlenecks or are deficiencies. They can utilize the data that’s being collected across the ALM, and filter that out to the broader business intelligence activities that the IT business is doing to see what’s actually working, and what’s not working, within the IT organization.

Gardner: We're going to be able to give non-IT people some real visibility into timetables, quality assurance curves, dates for completion, and that sort of thing, which to me seems essential. If you are putting a new product or a new service in the market, you are going to be ramping up your marketing, ramping up inventory and supply chain, and are going to be looking into manufacturing, if that's the basis of the product. You really need to coordinate all these things with development, and that has been haphazard.

Am I reading more into this, or do you really plan to be able to give non-IT people these dials, and this kind of a dashboard by which to run their entire business -- but with greater visibility?

Brown: That is exactly what we are proposing. Borland is very committed right now on Open ALM to deliver a platform that allows organizations to leverage their own configured processes and technologies to gain the insights necessary to really start having confidence in what they are doing. That confidence is going to be increased by providing them the tools and technologies so they can track, measure, and improve their processes.

Gardner: Let's take it back to Carey Schwaber. Carey, in your analysis of the market is there a potential for a significant productivity boost by bringing visibility into software development and activities into the larger context of business development and go-to-market campaigns?

Schwaber: I think there is. And there is a great degree of redundancy that happens to a lot of development efforts that have already been accomplished, or just redundancy of documentation. Even when it’s not redundancy, the problem is that people are pursuing different goals -- when you have testers who are testing against out-of-date requirements, and the business analyst wants them testing against the newer requirements. We've got the problem of an overlap of efforts. Then we've got the problem of misaligned efforts. Together those really eat away your productivity and waste precious development dollars.

There are a couple of ways you can use better ALM practices to improve productivity. The first is to get numbers about what you are really doing today to measure how often these things are happening. That is the first step that you need to take before you can take remedial action. The second one is just making sure that you have people working off of common data, that there is one way to represent the truth -- not just about one part of the lifecycle, but the entire lifecycle. You have to have the appropriate correlation between those disparate parts.

Gardner: Brian Kilcourse, to your point about CIOs trying to demonstrate value in real terms -- to be viewed as a productivity center and not a cost center -- do you think that this visibility into application development can give you, as a CIO, the tools you need to go to the CEO and say, “Here is what we are going to do, and when we are going to do it.”

Kilcourse: Certainly, if you as a CIO can map specific IT activities back to the business requirements that drive them, you have a much stronger set of metrics to indicate your alignment to the business than you have otherwise.

There is a huge disconnect between the front of a development process, which is always driven by business requirements, and the back-end of the process, which is always post-production maintenance. Between those two spaces there are a lot of things that go on. Somewhere along the line, in what I characterize as the business technology handoff, there is a big disconnect. Even with the best intentions, because of the complexity of the technology solutions available, the business really does lose track of what those guys down in IT are doing. The ability to overcome that chasm would go a long way toward solving the historical distrust between the two organizations.

Gardner: Do you sense that there are any particular vertical industries or even types of development projects that would benefit from an approach like Open ALM better or first? Where is the low-hanging fruit for this?

Kilcourse: That’s a great question. No business that I am aware of starts from scratch, either with a technology group or with the business that it supports. So any business that is trying to infuse the business process with the information asset in new ways is a candidate for this. I focus a lot on retail. And I can tell you from my experience in retail that those organizations are ripe for this kind of capability. There is a tremendous amount of distrust between the executive side of the house and the IT side of the house in that particular industry. I see it in other industries as well. But even in such obviously highly correlated industries like financial services there is still a tremendous room for improvement.

Gardner: Do you think Open ALM makes more sense for those organizations that are in fast-moving markets? Retail, of course, is like that because they have to anticipate, sometimes months in advance, the desires of a culture or a human fashion-driven impetus to buy. And then they have to act on that. Do you think that for those companies that are involved with fast time-to-market that this would be particularly important?

Kilcourse: Certainly fast time-to-market causes fast marketplace changes. The problem in IT across so many factors is that the IT organization cannot respond quickly enough to changes in the business environment. That's not particular to retail. It happens everywhere. To the extent that you can eliminate the friction that exists in the delivery process within the IT organization -- so that the company actually is getting the maximum amount of traction for their investment dollars -- it's going to help.

Carey pointed out, and I thought it was a really good point, that there is a lot of wasted activity that goes on because of rework and focusing on the wrong requirements that might not have the biggest benefit -- but might be the thorniest problem that somebody faces. We don’t always have visibility into that. We find out only at the end when we tally up the score and find out where the dollars really went and why we had to go to Phase 2, Phase 3 and Phase 9 of a project, because we couldn’t get it all done in the first shot.

The ability to focus IT energy where it really matters most to the business is a big goal of most CIOs that I know.

Gardner: Carey, back to you. Do you concur that the fast time-to-market is a major impetus? If so, what other ones do you see in terms of where common views of practices and processes for application development are super-important?

Schwaber: I agree that fast time-to-market or any time-to-market pressure is definitely a reason you would need to have your ducks better aligned up front. But I don’t know any companies that don’t want to do a better job of satisfying their business customer’s demands for the same software in less time. That's a pretty universal desire, no matter whether you have a lot of time-to-market pressure in your industry or not.

So, I would say that we all want more for less. On top of that, I would add compliance requirements, where you need to confirm that the software you are developing does what the business wants it to, so that you know that you are producing accurate financial reports, or even that you have some kind of internal compliance requirement.

You know you are looking to get toward Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI) Level 2 or Level 3, and you want some proof that you are actually going to do that. ALM capabilities can really help you in that area. So those kind of pressures really matter. But any time we get away from the old halcyon ideal of the business customer telling the developer what to write, and then the developer immediately implementing it, we have opportunities for miscommunication. The more people, geographies, and technologies we involve, the more complex it all gets, and the more we really need help keeping track of all the dependencies between the things that we are doing. That is really describing any project these days.

Gardner: Of course, software seems to be playing a larger role in how companies operate. The technology, in a sense, becomes the company.

Schwaber: How many business processes are there that aren’t automated by IT, either today, or plan to be automated by IT within the next five years? Business processes that we can’t even imagine will be embodied in software eventually.

Gardner: Let’s get back to Marc Brown. Marc, at Borland you have come out with this Open ALM approach and you have had a lot of experience in development over the years. Do you have any metrics? Do you have any sense of what the pay-off here is through some of your existing customers -- maybe some beta examples? Do you have any typically "blank" percentage of savings? What are the initial payoffs from embracing Open ALM?

Brown: We certainly have seen the benefits with many organizations, which see the value in a number of ways. First, many organizations, because they are trying to improve their overall process, are attacking their deficiencies incrementally. We've got some organizations that have found their key issue today is poor requirements definition and management. They simply can't get requirements written accurately and in a way that they are testable up-front. This creates a huge amount of rework downstream.

We've got some really good examples where we have gone in and helped organizations improve their requirements definition and management process, and we found really dramatic improvements. On one occasion, an organization was able to achieve a 66 percent improvement just on the analysis side -- when they were going through, looking at a legacy system, trying to define the "as-is" business processes, and then taking that work and collaborating with the business stake-holders to construct the "to-be" business process. That was typically taking the organization anywhere from 12 to 20 weeks. They saw a 66 percent decrease in that time by leveraging not only the process guidance we were giving them, but also other technologies that we could apply to that area of the process.

Gardner: So that’s a substantial opportunity, and that was only, I suppose, a partial embrace of Open ALM.

Brown: Yeah, and that’s the way a lot of people are looking at this. We are going out and helping organizations first of all pinpoint their largest areas of deficit or gap. That could fall into any of the four critical solution areas that we're helping organizations around project and portfolio management, or, as I mentioned, requirements definition and management, or lifecycle quality management. We are helping them understand where they have gaps or deficiencies today, and then incrementally improving that over time to embrace Open ALM as an incremental philosophy and approach.

Gardner: How has this so far impacted distributed types of development, where the organization has a number of development centers around the world, where perhaps you are outsourcing, and your outsourcing organizations are spread around the world? What’s the potential payback for those sorts of highly distributed development activities?

Brown: The real benefit we are seeing, and we will see more of this over time, is through the increased visibility. Again one of the biggest problems with organizations that are outsourcing today is the inability to aggregate or consolidate data from the outsourcer, the supplier, and the vendor, and to bring that together into a view, to have confidence that what’s happening from the outsourcer aligns with the overall business goals and original project plans. With our ability to help overlay our platform to bring together both the outsourcer’s technologies and data -- and then bring that together with the internal data -- we are able to bridge the gaps that they are having today, so that they have more confidence in the data they are seeing.

Gardner: How about Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)? It seems to me that as you break things down into services -- if we eradicate more of the silos around runtime environments -- we are at the same time knocking down silos in design-time. We might be able to get into some sort of a virtuous cycle, whereby we can adjust development to suit what’s going on in the field, which then is able to adapt to business requirements. That seems to be a big pay-off from SOA.

Let me throw that out to the crowd. What do you think is going to be the impact of SOA on development?

Brown: I'll take the first crack at this, Dana. I do think that SOA will certainly provide a lot of benefits, because it is one of the first practical approaches to help organizations realize the benefits of reuse. It's something that a lot of organizations had talked about time and time again. But there has been a lack of a common infrastructure or communications to bridge how that really happens over time. Many organizations simply said, “Look, my project’s not budgeted to create reusable code. We've got tight deadlines, and we have got a lot of work to do, and I am not going to have the time to do it in a reusable fashion.”

SOA gives people a good framework for how to actually structure applications to provide interoperability over time. I think this is a good approach for organizations to finally see the benefits of reuse, but it requires a lot of management and due-diligence when they are developing and deploying particular components. Because as they develop new versions or new components to supplement existing ones, they have to have more visibility in the usage levels, on who is using what, and so on.

Gardner: How about you, Brian? How do you see the evolution and maturation of ALM and the burgeoning ramp-up to SOA working either together, or perhaps at odds?

Kilcourse: Actually I don’t see them at odds at all. Because, first of all, SOA is an architectural concept, whereas Open ALM is a process concept or process model. In my company we just finished a piece of research on SOA and retail. What we found out is, if I could characterize something as a curiosity-understanding ratio, there is a lot of curiosity and very little understanding of what SOA really means in terms of how you get from "here" to "there."

As it relates to ALM -- going back to the original discussion that ALM covers everything from requirements all the way through post-production -- the notion of SOA breaking things down into reusable components or objects, business rules or metadata that can be redeployed almost at will as the business needs change, is a very powerful notion, especially in an environment such as the one that I service, where the business environment changes quite dramatically.

The challenge, of course, is taking something as broad as a business requirements and breaking them down into tiny service-level objects that then can be understood and implemented by the IT organization. If you don’t have some way to map that to the business requirements, you could have a worse bowl of spaghetti than you have now. In that context, these things are very tightly interwoven.

Gardner: How about you Carey? A last word on SOA and ALM?

Schwaber: Well, a lot of the great words have already been taken. But what I would add is that SOA introduces more dependencies among development projects then we are used to. It really requires us to have some way of coordinating our efforts across projects. In the past, projects often used completely different technologies for managing their lifecycles.

So this is yet another impetus for us to have a better way of connecting disparate tools from different vendors that use different technologies. Otherwise we end up not communicating the right data at the right time about services, about service levels, about service quality -- and we end up chasing our tails, trying to figure out what it is we have to do to build services that other people can reuse in effective ways that map to the business processes we are looking to automate.

Gardner: I suppose that quality and quality assurance are important when we go into these more componentized services. It seems to me that history has borne out that quality comes from getting it right the first time, and that really means business requirements.

Schwaber: SOA really does make quality that much more of an issue. We aren’t that good at it for basic, monolithic applications. Imagine how bad we’ll be at it with SOA?

I really see SOA giving us an opportunity to do better, because in every service a defect is propagated to every single application that consumes that service. But if the service is high-quality, that quality level is propagated, too. Essentially we have a mandate to do a much better job on quality in our services because the stakes are so much higher. We really need to bulletproof services that are built for reuse.

Gardner: Marc, to you now. As the stakes are getting higher, Borland has identified an important initiative. What is it that puts Borland into position to lead in this segment? Is it because of your heritage, acquisitions, the position you’ve taken on openness, or is it because of a "secret sauce?" What is it about Borland that makes you able to rise to this challenge?

Brown: It’s a couple of things. First, Borland in its overall business strategy is completely focused on helping organizations transform the way they do software, and we are not promoting any particular type of platform or development environment. We are all about helping people understand how to manage the actual processes that govern ALM. I think we have got a little bit of a secret sauce, because we are somewhat neutral from the platform or development-environment perspective. There are other vendors in this space who certainly have specific ties with a particular platform or development environment.

One thing that really distinguishes us from the others in the game is the fact that we are really focused on helping customers solve their true pains, which is giving them the metrics and measurements they need to be more successful at software. And at the same time, we support their current investments and future investments. So for us we’ve got full focus on ALM, and we are committed to supporting the platforms, the development environments, and the processes that organizations use today -- and those that they are going to use in the future.

Gardner: Great. Well, thanks very much. This has been a BriefingsDirect podcast discussion, a sponsored podcast about Application Lifecycle Management and the evolution of software development into a managed business process.

We’ve been joined by Carey Schwaber, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. Thanks, Carey.

Schwaber: My pleasure.

Gardner: Brian Kilcourse is the CEO of Retail Systems Alert Group, and a former senior vice president and CIO at Longs Drug Stores. Thanks, Brian.

Kilcourse: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: And Marc Brown is the vice president of product marketing at Borland. Thanks, Marc.

Brown: Thank you.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, your host and moderator, and the principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening.

Podcast Sponsor: Borland Software.

Listen to the podcast here.

Transcript of Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect podcast on Open ALM and ALM 2.0. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2007. All rights reserved.