Today's rational; tomorrow's rationale?

Kalyan Sridhar, country manager, Rational, IBM Software Group India, shares the new code of business that is refreshing its strategy and portfolio with a visible impact. All this and more, as he shares in this interview with Pratima H, from CIOL.

A report by Evans Data Corporation on Indian Software Developers' Market indicates a very healthy and growing software development industry in India. The number of software developers in India can skyrocket from 1.8 million in 2008 to 2.7 million in 2010 at a clip of about 23 per cent per year over the next few years.

This accelerated growth in the number of developers along with increased awareness and traction around quality assurance, testing, and configuration management are fuelling the growth of application development and the quality lifecycle tools market in the country.

Not surprising that Rational has added Max New York Life Insurance, Nucleus Software, Samsung Electronics, Robert Bosch, Apollo Hospitals, Persistent Systems, IFlex in the first half of 2008. We talk on the potential and potluck with IBM Rational here.

M&A action is always the media’s favourite. So let’s start with that first. It’s interesting to see how IBM has plugged spaces in the testing area with acquisitions like Watchfire and then Ounce Labs. A quick comment on their rationale and also on the speculated overlap concerns between AppScan and the source code scanning capabilities that are now gained through Ounce Labs.

We did have that little gap on white box testing even after we filled the black box testing part with Watchfire. Overlap possibilities are not really here. Appscan had some gap on what customers were really expecting on white box testing, so with the new acquisition we removed an area of concern actually. Both are not competitive, only more complimentary. It demonstrates how IBM’s offerings are strengthening the SDLC tracks along with new tools and acquisitions that the market calls for.

What do you make out of the challenges posed by Agile Software Development to the traditional world of Waterfall SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle)? And how impactful is the competition from players like ThoughtWorks who are whipping up a lot of buzz around the Agile philosophy of SDLC?

Yes, the entire SDLC has gone through big and multiple changes, and from Waterfall model to the Agile models. IBM is well positioned to help organizations in the new agile world. Our Jazz platform is a good example. It helps teams to collaborate via social networking and virtualized team memory to overcome geographic and temporal gaps in the software lifecycle.

It automates individual and team workflows throughout the software lifecycle, and enables reporting on the overall process with real-time insight into programs, projects, and resource utilization, which means teams make better informed decisions and continuously measure progress against desired business outcomes.

As to competition, we are, and will stay, market leaders and no competitor can come close to us when it comes to completeness of our portfolio. Also, we are scaling up our platforms from erstwhile range of few hundred users to few thousand users.

So you find Agile-based challengers disruptive enough?

Whatever we do, customer protection is taken care of, even in view of their existing investments. Now these investments could be into IBM or into rivals. At the same time, we make sure that we are well poised on the new wave of development.

How exciting is the user contribution part for Rational compared to OSS (Open Source S/w) Communities?

OSS is still very active on that front. But our recent announcements like Jazz are spinning out new excitement on collaboration and workforce productivity. We co-exist with OSS and other competitive offerings with confidence.

So what flavours is your portfolio going to take up next?

In terms of portfolio, this is probably the most exciting of all times for us. After a good platform like Jazz that we have come out with, we would be adding a lot of activities around it as well as new products into this platform. This year we would also focus on management view dashboards for project managers.

The BI (Business Intelligence) Cognos tool is integrating well with Rational. Now we can give business insights, dashboard and automation to a software project. Also be ready to expect some really exciting developments in the first and second quarters, though we can’t talk much about them now.

You just finished a national level conference for IBM Rational. As per some recent news, the IBM Rational software business has grown significantly in India, circa 2008. Gartner, Inc. has ranked IBM as the worldwide market share leader in the application development marketplace based on total software revenue for 2007. How potent do you find the depth and breadth of developers in India? Will the growth continue?

The IBM Rational Software Development Conference turned out to be one of the largest conferences in South Asia with over 7800 attendees, and it covered some key Sis (System integrators), business partners, customers and developers.