Looking to escalate and leverage software’s growing
importance throughout a wide and diverse range of industries and applications, IBM
has seen explosive growth within its embedded computing business partner
community.
Underscoring the channel’s interest in this market, IBM Innovate 2011,
the developer’s annual conference for Rational Software developers, attracted
400 business partners to Orlando, Fla., up from only 40 four years ago, company
executives said. Rational
and its 1,000 worldwide partners are helping customers reuse software
development tools, implement agile development tools and practices, and embed
software into an ever-growing array of products, executives noted.
Recognizing this opportunity, more than 20 business partners
used Innovate as the setting for announcing new products and services. Rational
also recognized solution providers and integrators during the event’s business
partner awards ceremony.
"The number of business partners in Rational’s
ecosystem continues to grow each year and these organizations play an important
role in driving key growth areas for IBM," Michael Loria, vice president, business development at IBM
Rational Software, told Channel Insider. "The Rational Award allows IBM to
recognize companies with solutions that improve the software delivery
capabilities of our customers, and help them derive greater value from their
investments in software."
Rational Solutions in
the Cloud
Like many of their counterparts across the IT spectrum,
several Rational partners have focused their development attention on creating
new cloud-based products or services.
CloudOne, a
provider of Saas (software-as-a-service) services and Rational tools, discussed
an upcoming Rational applications store, similar to the app stores available on
Apple and Android. Although the as-yet unnamed store will first include 12 to
16 apps, there are about 100 appropriate applications on the market today, said
John McDonald, CloudOne CEO, in an interview.
In addition, the Naperville, Ill.-based service provider
launched TestStorm, a “canned performance testing service,” he said.
“Lots of companies that do software development internally
would like to do more performance tests before they go live,” said McDonald.
“We let them execute a performance test from the cloud. It’s much easier to set
up and encourage more testing. It’s extremely elastic.”
With TestStorm, organizations have access to up to 50,000
simulated users against applications including HTTP, SAP,
Siebel, SIP, TCPsocket, Citrix, Windows, Linux and mainframe, without needing
to buy the hardware and software necessary to conduct these tests internally.
CloudOne provides both the environment and partners are available to provide
assistance on reading results, improving performance, or other services, he
said.
“Our customers have saved more than 70 percent off
traditional testing methods,” McDonald said. “We’re fast, too. We can often
complete tests within 24 hours.”
Rational business partner
Atos Origin also turned its attention to testing in the cloud, debuting
Test & Acceptance Management Services, which lets clients use a pay-per-go
use model for the entire development cycle. The solution, designed by Atos
Origin using the Rational Jazz toolset, gives organizations an efficient,
flexible way to manage testing requirements, according to the service provider,
which has headquarters in Bezons, France.
“The market for cloud computing is set to grow fast and we
have identified testing services as one of the first and fastest growing areas.
Testing in the cloud is flexible, cost efficient and fast, helping clients to
get services and products to market more quickly," said François
Gruau, senior vice president at Atos Origin, in a statement.
Expanding
relationships and milestones
Worksoft, a Rational business partner, develops automated
business process validation and testing solutions designed to slash the time
associated with software testing. Although many companies continue to conduct
testing manually, those that adopt automated solutions can reduce the time and
expense associated with this necessary-yet-onerous task by between 40 percent
and 60 percent, said Jim Kent, CEO of
Worksoft, in an interview.
“I’d say 80 [percent], 90 percent of people do manual
testing. Once you’ve automated, you can look at things you’re about to change
and see how they’re going to impact your processes,” he said. “The problem with
automated solutions is you can do it one time and it’s very different to do it
again. We solve that problem.”
Worksoft Certify supports SAP
solutions and uses an object-driven approach which eliminates the need to
generate scripts or write testing code. The solution automatically identifies
and extracts representative SAP data, and
embeds it into Worksoft Certify during the construction of a test case. The
software identifies planned changes to SAP
Solution Manager, then recommends and conducts business process tests based
upon these proposals.
During Innovate 2011, Worksoft and IBM
disclosed a new partnership that allows IBM
to resell Worksoft Certify, Certify Impact and Certify Data as an integration
option to the IBM Rational Quality Management
suite for testing environments running on SAP.
“By this relationship, we’re on IBM’s
price list worldwide by the end of June,” Kent
said. “It will help our brand awareness incredibly. We’re opening doors to new
opportunities.”
Lifecycle Management
Services Unwrapped
In collaboration with IBM,
Capgemini launched the Agile Legacy
Lifecycle service at Innovate. The service addresses one of organizations’ top
IT priorities: dealing with the costly problems associated with managing,
maintaining and updating legacy solutions.
“A typical enterprise’s application portfolio spending grows
at a compound annual growth rate of between 4 percent and 7 percent. During a
15-year life span, the average go-live cost hovers at approximately 8 percent
of the lifetime total cost of ownership, leaving 92 percent of the full cost of
operation to sustain and maintain function—often without clear responsibility
or accountability for that funding,” wrote Gartner analysts Matthew Goldman and
Allie Young earlier this year.
The new service takes aim at this dilemma, which affects
organizations across geographies and vertical markets, said Lon Holden, Capgemini
IBM alliance, global enablement manager, in
an interview. The service features a “modernize-to-improve” service instead of
a traditional “one-stop modernize and pay” format, which typically requires a
large, upfront investment. The incremental, iterative service incorporates
WARP1 methodology—Wide-angle Application Replication Program—which uses a
hypothesis-driven approach, and melds business and system facts with
change-management aspects to generate an action plan. The service incorporates IBM’s
software, which Capgemini uses to automate and assist in clients’ modernization
initiatives through analysis of the code base and the subsequent uncovering of
hidden logic and challenges.
“We are addressing the problem of legacy application
modernization,” Alain Olivier, vice president at Capgemini, told Channel
Insider, noting that the service can leverage clients’ investments in IBM
and non-IBM technologies.