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IBM Rational's Big-Band Jazz Release
6/3/2008
IBM's Rational Software division yesterday unveiled 20 new commercial products based on its Jazz collaboration platform and opened up the Jazz community to all interested parties.
IBM Rational Team Concert is one of the 20 products, and something of a focal point of the multi-product announcement. It provides, said IBM Rational Director Dave Locke, a kind of hub for the other offerings. Essentially, Team Concert is a collaboration portal designed to keep distributed software teams connected through such Web 2.0-type social networking technologies as instant messaging and presence awareness. It focuses on collaboration, process instantiation and bringing the teams together, he said.
Team Concert comes in a free Concert Express-C Edition, which is available for download from the Jazz.net Web site. It uses the open source Apache Derby Java relational database management system and Apache Tomcat Web app server to "help teams gain experience with the concept of global software delivery and see how it could work in their environment," Locke said.
There's also a Team Concert Express Edition, aimed at software delivery teams with 10 to 50 members, and a Team Concert Standard Edition, optimized for mid-sized companies and smaller teams in large companies. This latter edition includes such additional capabilities as customizable process, real-time project health, enterprise scalability and extensibility. All three of these editions of the product are available now.
An enterprise edition, featuring "the broadest array of capabilities that any size team can use," will be available next year, the company said. This edition is expected to include full equivalent versions of IBM Rational ClearCase, IBM Rational ClearQuest and IBM Rational BuildForge. Big Blue also plans to introduce IBM Rational Requirements Composer, a tool designed to help software delivery teams to gain project consensus, and IBM Rational Quality Manager, a test planning and process solution. Both are Jazz-based.
This is the first commercial release of a Jazz-based product since the company launched the Jazz.net community portal last June. Jazz started as an internal project, a joint effort of IBM's Rational and Research divisions to build a scalable, extensible team-collaboration platform for integrating tasks across the software lifecycle. Jazz is not open source software, but an "open commercial" platform, Locke explained. It's a model that IBM hopes will foster an "open, transparent approach to community development" that will improve team agility and collaboration. The company claims that 15,000 people have contributed to the project since its inception.
Eleven IBM Rational partners are also announcing Jazz-based products, which are expected to ship by the end of this year. Among those partners:
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