BANGALORE, INDIA: IBM has announced the opening up of Jazz.net for IBM Rational partners, IBM Rational customers, 2,700+ IBM Rational Software Development Conference attendees, and select others in the global software development community providing access to IBM's Jazz platform project. 

Jazz, a joint project of IBM Rational and IBM Research provide input on requirements, report bugs and ultimately contribute to the development of IBM's industry-leading software delivery platform.  By opening up the software development community as a transparent software supply chain, the Jazz.net community will drive the evolution of standards and common components incorporated in future IBM software releases.

The Jazz project is an open commercial community designed to improve team agility and collaboration. It also helps customers to transparently collaborate with IBM and each other.

"Open commercial software development is the next major innovation in collaborative engineering," said Steve Robinson, vice president, IBM Rational Software.

He added, "IBM is taking software development to a new level, and through participation in the Jazz.net community, customers can influence the products they depend on for software delivery."

To jump-start the collaborative development process at Jazz.net, IBM has posted several incubator projects focused on code analysis, requirements management and other aspects of Agile software development projects.  IBM is encouraging the greater software development community to collaborate on these projects, and the Rational Team Concert beta.