IBM SWG Roadmap & Strategy

A session lead by Julie King, IBM, a distinguished engineer, chair of the SWG AB at IBM.
- WebSphere Portal v6.0 was developed over more than 10 sites worldwide. That's a distributed development environmen. Truly global integrated development environment.
- Acquisitions strategy will continue - divided into 4 tactics - bold market entry, complementary point products, opportunistic consolidation & market leadership (Rational for example).
- Rational Brand strategy - Moved from individual to team space (CC, CQ), then to organizational focus (requirements) and now to business space.
- 2007 announcements - Asset manager (RAM), AppScan, Functional and Performance tester for SOA and developer tools for SystemZ.
2008 will deliver updates to much of these tools and more on team collaboration with Jazz. It will be an environment for better collaborating all the people involved in the development.
- AppScan (recently WatchFire) which apparently we at Risotech specialize at, seems to be one of the revenue generators for 2008.
- IBM itself uses RAM for services assets (GBS).
- Lotus brand - Aimed at more collaboration. Lotus connections which is a kind of facebook for intranet. Has tagging, blogging and many other features.
- Information management - focus on Information / Data / Content.
- IBM Enables information as a service to connect the information into SOA. Key element for this is the master data management (MDM). One set of accurate and complete information.
- Emphasis is placed on performance management and score boards, based on Cognos acquisition.
- Tivoli - A change from Service management instead of system management. ITCAM and ITCAM for SOA has made a good progress to analyze the complexity of connections between the services. Tivoli has acquired a company to enable green datacenter management.
- WebSphere -
architectural focus - CEP, consumability, data center architecture.
The need for CEP - correlate all sort of events into data. Same as AMIT.
CEP/BEP engine is based on AptSoft acquisition that allows writing rules to combine different events from diferents sources into actions.
- plusOne initiative - prescriptive way of constructing and deploying cross brand software solutions that address customer business requirements incrementally using proven collateral.
- Virtualization is an important space for IBM to play in. They're looking into simplification through virtualization. Working on OVF standard to allow different images to define what they need to work together.
- WAS v7.0 will have a virtual image ready to run on Linux, instead of going through the installation path. Lawyers at IBM allow the SWG to distribute a product image WITH linux, which is a big change.

- Telelogic acquisition completion was just announced last Monday. This will affect the Rational and WebSphere portfolio.

- WMB, WESB, WDP roadmap - all play in different fields and from this point in time, they all have a roadmap and do not overlap. IBM sees them all as a class of capabilities.