"We don't anticipate any changes to (Rational's) product structure and road map," said Paraic Sweeney, vice president of marketing of WebSphere Business Integration at IBM, during an interview.
In addition, IBM intends to integrate Rational's products more tightly with its own software offerings, they said. Once the acquisition is completed, IBM plans to sell Rational's application development software through the Rational sales force, which will incorporate into IBM's own sales team, the companies said. The announcement is all part of a transformation of the application development market akin to the changes wrought on the office productivity software market by the release of Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite in the 1990s, Murphy said. Whereas IDEs have been focused on providing tools for editing, compiling and debugging code, they increasingly need to support so-called "life-cycle management" functions such as modelling, testing and version control, Murphy said. "I think it's something we had somewhat expected in that there's been over the past year a movement to where you can see the providers of integrated development environments (IDEs) expanding their toolkits such that they become integrated lifecycle environments," said Thomas Murphy, senior program director at the Meta Group Inc. Industry experts said the acquisition does not come as a surprise. HP said that it would continue to work with IBM/Rational and Microsoft and sees the future of application development in interoperability between the Java (J2EE) and Microsoft. (HP) said in a statement that it will continue to have a strong business relationship with Rational, including their joint activities as part of the industry group. Responding to news of the acquisition, Hewlett Packard Co. They need tools that provide design capability, and a platform for integrating team development," Mills said. "There's a shift in focus among medium and large size businesses to integrate horizontally, to create an on demand environment, to focus on process integration not function automation. "This will provide IBM with the end-to-end application development process integration that we hear customers telling us they want," said Steve Mills, IBM senior vice president and group executive of the Software Group, during a conference call Friday afternoon. Launched last year, the Eclipse project is managed by a consortium of vendors that includes Borland Software Corp., Fujitsu Software Corp., Red Hat Inc. The IBM WebSphere tools, built on the company's Eclipse open-source platform, provide a single portal-like interface that gives software developers access to a wide range of tools from other software vendors, including those made by Rational. IBM already offers close integration with a wide variety of Rational's software products. Ninety-eight of the Fortune 100 companies, including IBM, already use Rational's tools, according to the statement.
The acquisition will allow IBM in Armonk, New York, to provide a software development environment for companies that want to integrate their business processes and software infrastructure across their operations, including suppliers and customers, the companies said. Rational, which is located in Cupertino, California, provides software tools and services for developing business applications and other products, such as embedded software for cell phones, medical systems and other devices, the companies said in a joint statement. for US$2.1 billion, the companies said Friday. has agreed to acquire Rational Software Corp.