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IBM Buys Rational Software
An anonymous reader writes "Rational Software is going to be taken over by IBM. More info on Rational's website. RIP Rational. This is what rational is sending it's customers:
To our valued customers:
We are delighted to tell you that IBM and Rational Software have announced a definitive agreement for IBM to purchase Rational. This is a very exciting time for both companies and builds on the extensive business relationship IBM and Rational have had for over 20 years. Most importantly, it will provide significant benefits to you." Other readers submit links to the story in InformationWeek and the Mercury News.
It seems it's about time for IBM to demonstrate their loyalty to Free Software and Open Source by open sourcing Rational Rose -- the free software world is severely lacking in UML diagramming tools. So, what do you say IBM?
I used to use Rational about 3 years back. Has any progress been made on Rational diagrams being stored as XML? It would be nice if all the Rational files would be in XML, and then use some kind of SVG browser to look at the diagrams, and make small changes directly from a web browser.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I hope IBM's intention is to keep Rational evolving UML/RUP and not to strip out Clear Case, Req Pro, and Rose. A lot of the time, this is what happens when a big company buys a company like that, and it would be a real shame if this happened to Rational. Personally, I think UML and RUP continue to gain mindshare when it comes to Software Engineering Methodology.
Grady Booch recently spoke at our company, and his enthusiasm was infectious! It is obvious that he and the other Rational Fellows have a pretty good vision of where UML and RUP should go, and it would be a real shame if that was lost.
I don't have all that much to add, except -- God, Rational Rose was one of the buggiest, worst-designed pieces of software I've ever used. The one time I had to use it I prayed that someone over there would buy a copy of Visio to learn how a diagramming tool SHOULD be designed.
I always found it hysterically ironic that a tool that was touted by its makers as the ultimate way to develop software demonstrated so poorly its own usefulness.
Maybe after buying it IBM will run it into the ground ala Lotus. We can only hope.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I've seen Rational Software (Rational Rose Mainly) has improved in Stability since 1998 on the windows platform, but on Solaris it is better but still buggy. Hopefully IBM will improve the performance in Solaris. I hear it is ok in Linux, but room for improvement exists so we will se an improvement there, I've never personally used any Rational Software in Linux so I'm assuming what I've been told is true. I do hope IBM ports the software to other platforms well. I would sure love being able to make up some UML Diagrams on any system I desire with the same program. Together Soft is what I use often because it works so well on many platforms without fuss, but I prefer Rose as its UML is more standard and it just seems to crash less.
IBM could also do what our "friends" at Microsoft did to Visio and ruin a good piece of software with patented Microsoft bloat.
And, don't forget, IBM's "loyalty" to open source extends only as far as the server and mainframe world. Desktop is verboten. Hence no Lotus Notes client. And no open source Rationale Rose either, because that's a desktop tool too.
Omigod, I guess there still are some .com managers on the loose. Who in their right mind would spend 2.1 billion on a money losing company that has $154 million in SALES???
IBM must be planning to integrate the Rational process into a LOT of their products to justify this.
I seem to remember that MS Visual J++ was transfered to Rational. Was it transfered with a "hot potato" clause and Microsoft gets it back? Or can IBM pull the plug and bury it?
From what I've heard, this purchase of Rational by IBM can only be good news since the Rational products need some major tuning.
I also wonder if this doesn't have anything to do with Borland purchasing TogetherSoft( and getting TogetherJ )?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Most importantly, it will provide significant benefits to you.
...Look, there's nothing wrong with banner ads or corporate sponsorship, but...
Is it just me, or have more and more stories been taking on a decidedly 'advertisatory' (to coin a word) tone in the past year?
SlashDot did not used to be like this.
At least CNN.com and whatnot put 'ADVERTISEMENT' at the top of "stories that look like ads", and they put 'SPONSORED BY' by "stories that are sponsored by the very companies they cover". (Look at this gem of a screenshot). Shouldn't SlashDot do the same?
I might wish to politely suggest that, except in cases where anonymity is needed (e.g. when discussing something that could get someone sued, like DeCSS or something anti-MPAA or anti-RIAA), Anonymous Cowards should not be allowed to post stories.
When I read this story, the first thing I thought was that the poster was an employee for either IBM or Rational...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
You, sir, are obviously a masochist of the highest order. :-) CMVC ranks as to most convoluted piece of bloatware I've ever been forced to use in a Unix enviroment.
At my current workplace (IBM), a manadate from management that we migrate to CMVC from our home-grown set of SCCS scripts is causing nothing but pain. Every one of our developers would rather go to CVS.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Has anyone noticed that the "J2EE Editor" of Java Developer's Journal, for example, is saying that IBM is in his view strategically intent on becoming "Microsoft Two"...and that the whole process is moving faster than we developers seem to realize? He bases his view on having personally spoken with the SVP of IBM's Global Software Business. Sagar wonders who'll be next on IBM's shopping list: for example,will it be Sun?
Rational is the latest in a series of products touted to revolutionize the way software is created. It is not a drawing tool, although it does have that capability. They also have a versioning component, an automated test tool (formerly Team Test I think) and a whole bunch of other things added in by acquisition. As a true believer in Client/Server methods it is clear that these tools can do a great deal of good when used properly, or a great deal of harm (at a high price) when used by "amateurs".
.Net for all future development and they behave as though they are sleeping with the Microsoft sales reps. Forget that the selection itself makes no sense (Java a language vs .Net a loosely designed framework), I'm sure they will pick .Net. again missing the chance to go with a language (Java or C++) that will be around almost forever. They'll send 100 people to C# classes, and they'll try and figure out how to pretend that they used Rational to design it all. Anything that goes wrong will be blamed on bad advice from consultants, anything that miraculously works will be claimed as the bright idea of a government employee who has never coded a line of either code or design specs.
A history of blunders:
I worked at a shop that several years ago decided to go the "Client/Server" route to save money over the old mainframe methods. As far as they were concerned "Client/Server" mean "lets buy a bunch of PCs and play games on them during lunch". The application was a secondary consideration. This was a worldwide highly distributed application. Being a government organization, they had tons of money to spend though, so the reasons for switching had more to do with what the top people were reading in PC/Week and such than any concern about the money involved. The Clipper code was a disaster, with data constantly being lost for no apparent reason. The mainframe/mini approach consisting of a few hundred minicomputers was replaced with several thousand PCs, in reality the hardware costs went up. This all happened during a time when you had to replace all your PCs every year or two to still be able to even run the latest version of Windows and Office.
On top of this the number of people involved in the process soared, network bandwidth had to increase substantially, not to cope with the application, but with the increased size of prettily formatted Word documents that were flying around. In fact when the network folk decided to project future traffic, they ignored the application altogether (since there wasn't a design from which they could work anyway) and simply did a statistical analysis of e-mail traffic. As dumb as this seemed at the time, the results actually worked pretty well.
About the time the Clipper programs were fully deployed, Powersoft came along claiming to be best buddies with Microsoft. The company President even visited and told us that they and Microsoft were going to work together to make Powerbuilder the ultimate programming language of the future. The folks I worked for bought this BS hook, line, and sinker. The crappy Clipper programs were replaced (over a several year period) with crappy Powerbuilder programs who's design specs looked something like: "Make it look like the old minicomputer programs we had before". In other words, nobody really understood the original programs and didn't want to do the homework to figure them out either.
Realizing this last fact to some extent, the organization bought into another product called System Engineer (I forget the vendors name). SE was a high level design tool that claimed to actually be able to generate full-blown applications if given sufficiently detailed design specs. The only catch was that it only generated C++ or Cobol, and generating Powerbuilder was a "future feature". Just as well, because none of the programmers involved had the skill or patience to use the product, so they just did their database diagrams with a bootleg copy of Erwin. When pressed to do so they would run Systems Engineer in "reverse engineering" mode to produce the "artifact" documents needed to demonstrate what a great idea this client/server stuff was after all.
It was no surprise at all to me that about a year ago they asked someone (not me) for advice about where to go with this technology. Whoever did the research must have spent about 2 hours reading the trade rags before calling the sales reps to start convincing them that Rational was the "next big thing". In addition to the software being expensive, you almost have to agree to sign up for training in order to use the product. The training is VERY expensive, and with the bloated development staff that we had, this was made even worse.
The good news is that they have finally realized they went down the wrong path with Powerbuilder. They at least in that process got their data into a real RDBMS (Oracle).
The bad news is that they have decided to pick between Java and
In about 4-5 years they will start the process all over again. And, by the way the mainframe is still there, doing the hard parts of the application, cleaning up the messes that the PCs have made, with large parts of it written in *sigh* COBOL.
Your tax dollars at work again.
Back in the 80's IBM failed to understand a very important concept: That whatever gadget or technology finds its way onto peoples desks at home will eventually find its way into solving business problems too. Whether it works or not will be decided so far in the future that nobody will get blamed or lose their job for not really thinking things through.
I think IBM has learned its lesson though. They have their fingers in hundreds of pies, some of which are strategic, others seemingly nonsensical. They are positioned to make money both in hardware sales and consulting services whenever an organization gets so wrapped up in whiz-bang technologies that they can't extricate themselves. They have all the tools at their disposal to do mainframe/mini/or totally decentralized solutions and they are not dependent on any one vendor be it Oracle, Microsoft, Intel or even their own hardware divisions to come up with a solution that fits.
For some it may seem like technology has moved rapidly, but we are just now accomplishing things that were predicted as being right around the corner when I was in college in the 70's. I blame a lot of this on clever marketing by Microsoft, Intel and a few others (Powersoft, Rational among them) that substituted nicely packaged products (and games) for products that actually did something useful. I have high hopes that the Open Source movement will end this nonsense. A steady stream of products that "just work" and don't cost anything to try will keep the sales reps of the future a lot more honest than those of the past. I have more to say about this, but I guess this is too long already. IBM will conceivably Open Source parts of the product suit that are not particularly unique, but nothing they do is about charity, nor should it be. I hope that creating the Microsoft and Intel duopoly was the last act of charity that they engage in.