IBM Partners with Rational Software to Aid in Application Management

Joanna Doyle

A new agreement by IBM and Rational Software Corp. (Cupertino, Calif.) aims to provide e-business tools that will make it easier for project developers to work together.

IBM and Rational Software have agreed to develop, market and sell software that enables development teams to jointly build, deploy and manage e-business applications. Such teams may include analysts, developers, testers, etc. The agreement is designed to enable customers to use Rational’s ClearCase and ClearQuest solutions to develop advanced e-business applications for IBM WebSphere Applications servers.

Under the terms of the partnership, which expands an application development alliance the companies announced in June, IBM and Rational agree to pursue improved integration between Rational’s SCM solution and IBM’s VisualAge product family. This will be accomplished by incorporating VisualAge Team Connection technology into ClearCase and ClearQuest, both of which will be marketed jointly by IBM and Rational.

“This agreement is good news for IBM customers and presents an attractive opportunity to adopt Rational’s ClearCase and ClearQuest SCM solution, which IDC has identified as the market revenue-leader for the last three years,” says IDC analyst Dick Heiman. “The combination of Rational’s SCM solution with IBM’s e-business application development tools will help accelerate the development of mission critical e-business applications.”

“As the pressure to quickly deliver high-quality e-business applications increases, the need will increase for more and more developers to build these applications as a team,” says Joe Damassa, VP of marketing execution for transformation and integration for IBM software group. “Rational’s ClearCase and ClearQuest products, along with IBM’s VisualAge family are IBM’s preferred tools for building e-business applications of the future.”

“Today’s agreement will accelerate Rational ClearCase’s position as the market-leading software configuration management solution,” says Eric Schurr, senior VP of marketing and Windows Suite products for Rational. “Today’s announcement represents a great next-step in our strategic alliance with IBM and we look forward to providing customers with a cross-platform SCM solution that automates team collaboration to accelerate customers’ transition to e-business.”

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