What is IBM Rational?
From project design to implementation, IBM Rational helps bring technology and software together to help you and your team collaborate more effectively on software development and delivery projects. Today's focus is on increasing productivity, reducing time to market and responding quickly to new technologies to drive innovation and increase customer value. The IBM Rational Software Delivery platform helps you to solve challenges ranging from understanding the impact of open source software to managing risk, from catching bugs in testing to improving communication across worldwide development teams.
From project design to implementation, IBM Rational helps bring technology and software together to help you and your team collaborate more effectively on software development and delivery projects. Today's focus is on increasing productivity, reducing time to market and responding quickly to new technologies to drive innovation and increase customer value. The IBM Rational Software Delivery platform helps you to solve challenges ranging from understanding the impact of open source software to managing risk, from catching bugs in testing to improving communication across worldwide development teams.
The IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform is an integrated platform providing a complete solution for developing software and software-based systems. It allows practitioners to operate more efficiently and deliver innovative products and services that set their organizations apart from their competitors.
1. By controlling the process of software development in an open, proven and yet modular manner, software development teams can:
2. Manage value by automating and enforcing best practices that keep your software projects aligned with changing business priorities.
3. Develop flexibly with an open, collaborative software development platform that offers maximum freedom in selecting how and where you source projects.
4. Control risk and change with a solution that captures, communicates, and integrates policies, practices, and metrics across project teams and diverse contributors throughout the software life cycle.
Regardless of platform or application type - Eclipse, Java, .NET, Linux or embedded and pervasive - Rational takes you from start to finish, ensuring the complete success of your project. Success in today's on demand marketplace depends on a company's ability to differentiate business performance in both good times and bad.
The IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform, a cross IBM Software Group solution, enables differentiation by defining, automating and integrating the key aspects of software across roles, from the analyst to the architect, developer, tester and project manager. The IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform is:
Proven. It's not just tools; IBM Rational's Software Delivery Platform emphasizes best practices and processes which make thousands of high-performance software teams and practitioners successful.
Complete. Gain visibility throughout your software lifecycle by supporting every member of your development team, as well as your business and operations stakeholders.
Open. You can leverage existing assets and choose from a wide array of development languages, deployment platforms, and partner technologies - including Microsoft .NET, BEA, and Oracle solutions.
Modular. Choose the exact tools and adoption path that best fit your needs. Use your existing tools with components of the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform - no need to "rip and replace" what you already have.
What can Rational do for me and my company?
Most vendors offering IT solutions often fail to address the entire software delivery lifecycle, focusing on only those portions of the cycle with which they have expertise. However, with companies under significant pressure to transform IT from a cost center into a cost effective enabler of innovation and business success, overlooked portions of the delivery lifecycle are overlooked opportunities for improving your software team's effectiveness, predictability and productivity.
IBM Rational's business driven development approach is unique in its breadth, addressing each and every phase of the software delivery lifecycle, helping teams to manage value, develop flexibly and control risk and change. With the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform, software development teams are provided tools for the key roles:
For the Project Manager: a variety of interactive dashboards to help management make investment decisions based upon up-to-the-minute information concerning project health and resource availability.
For Architects: specialized tools to capture business process design and system requirements and then help translate them into executable code.
For Developers: development processes and best practices to provide direction and give advice for teams lacking discipline or looking for greater efficiency.
For the entire team: workflow automation software to help streamline development and delivery and integrated products to establish clear links, traceable relationships and secure content for all of the assets created by and for the software delivery lifecycle.
Here are a few products from IBM Rational that are most commonly used by organizations.
Rational Rose
Supports Web services, SOA, UML 2.x, custom pattern development and adoption, and powerful data modeling that supports Entity-Relationship modeling.
ClearCase
Offers reliable, scalable and flexible software asset management for midsize-to-large development teams
ClearCase Multisite
Enables parallel development across geographically distributed environments.
Clear Quest
Provides flexible defect- and change-tracking across the application development lifecycle.
Software Testing and Quality Management
IBM Rational software testing and quality management transforms the way teams work together to delivery enduring quality.
Enterprise Modernization
Rational Asset Analyzer: Provides in-depth insight into dependencies within and among mainframe and composite applications. It also assists IT personnel with the maintenance, extension, and reuse of existing mainframe and web applications in modernization efforts such as SOA (service-oriented architecture).
The IBM Rational suite of products also provides technology, best practices and industry expertise to help companies succeed in an agile development environment - regardless of their size and complexities.
The product can help you:
1. Create agile development processes and workflows to meet the unique needs of your project
2. Integrate flexibly with existing development tools
3. Improve product quality by pinpointing quality issues early in the lifecycle
4. Automate handoffs and provide real-time information, so teams work together more productively
5. Share processes, best practices and resources between teams for high levels of efficiency
6. Empower developers with pre-flight build support to improve quality and increase the frequency of code check-ins
7. Accelerate build management processes for significantly faster builds.
2. Integrate flexibly with existing development tools
3. Improve product quality by pinpointing quality issues early in the lifecycle
4. Automate handoffs and provide real-time information, so teams work together more productively
5. Share processes, best practices and resources between teams for high levels of efficiency
6. Empower developers with pre-flight build support to improve quality and increase the frequency of code check-ins
7. Accelerate build management processes for significantly faster builds.
With the Rational suite of products, the CIO's job is made easier. It allows the CIO to deliver business results faster and better - with less. For business agility, a CIO must get business value from applications and infrastructure. An SOA (service-oriented architecture) approach that fundamentally adapts business processes and enables automation can help create a flexible, dynamic and more responsive application portfolio and IT infrastructure, and the Rational suite of products helps a CIO to handle this job very efficiently.Rational offers both solution-focused offerings specializing in issues such as globally distributed teams, regulatory compliance and the adoption of service oriented development approaches, as well as product and integrated product suites for individual practitioners across the software delivery spectrum.
