BANGALORE, INDIA: IBM has announced the combination of 20 new products, which include enhancement on existing products at the IBM Rational Development Conference. This is the fourth conference in India with more than 5000 attendees. The new offerings break down the walls that inhibit organizations from truly collaborating with partners, suppliers, customers and their employees.

The new products use IBM's Jazz collaborative technology to help geographically distributed software delivery teams work together in an open, real-time and transparent manner to more effectively deliver and source software solutions.

"Currently, organizational, geographical and technical silos inhibit business agility and return on software investments.  In a globally integrated enterprise, organizations need to transform how they collaborate to get the job done," said Steve Robinson, vice president, worldwide sales, Rational Software, IBM. "IBM's Jazz platform breaks down location, infrastructure and organizational barriers, transforming the practice of global software delivery."

Speaking on the market drivers for application software in India, Steve Robinson said: "The number of software developers in India is expected to grow at 23 percent over the next few years. Many of the emerging Indian ISVs and GSIs such as Tata and Wipro are heading to make a global footprint, which is helping India to emerge as a product based country."

In harnessing the collaborative capabilities of Jazz the 20 products will help development teams to improve and manage project requirements in real time. Jazz collaborative technology provides a platform of services enabling powerful integration similar to the Eclipse desktop consolidation. Jazz is set to transform the industry by supporting interoperability across a broad array of collaborative application lifecycle management solutions.

IBM's new Jazz platform can transform software delivery into a dynamic integration of people, processes and projects.  As the scope of software development and delivery broadens in this era of globalization, IBM is incorporating social networking and Web 2.0 practices into the new versions of its market-leading software delivery platform.

Jazz has three major offerings, which include:

* IBM Rational Team Concert includes automated data gathering resulting in significantly less documentation and provides real-time project health information required to reduce project risk.
* IBM Rational Requirements Composer currently in the beta stage is to help software delivery teams gain a common ground on how a project should be designed with the help of storyboards, sketches, scenarios and models. This will enable teams visualize commitments and reduce rework and review cycles on requirements.
* IBM Rational Quality Manager is a comprehensive test planning and process software with 100% distributed access and Web 2.0-based collaboration it traces the stages of the project progress in the software delivery cycle.

"Jazz established a very interactive community that enables our developers to participate in the community," said Jamie Thomas, vice president, product development & customer support, IBM Rational Software. "At Jazz.net, members of the community can transparently collaborate, provide input on requirements, report bugs and ultimately contribute to the development of IBM's industry-leading software delivery platform. The Jazz.net community will drive the evolution of standards and common components incorporated in future IBM software releases."

IBM is developing the Jazz technology platform using a new approach called open commercial software development, which takes place at www.jazz.net.