IBM today announced a more effective way for organizations to quickly build, deliver and manage high quality services. Through new software integrations, organizations can manage and automate processes across their development, test and operations teams. These new integrations give clients better control over the services they provide to customers while lowering the overall cost of delivery and shortening the time to market for new services.

The IBM Service Management offerings integrate IBM Rational and Tivoli software, making it easier for organizations to align their software delivery processes -- Rational automates the build cycle during the development phase and then releases it to Tivoli to automatically deploy it onto servers in production and manage overall quality and performance.

This integration helps ensure that organizations have auditable and traceable software delivery, faster build and deployment cycles, reduced risk of production roll-backs, and lower overall costs.

Bridging the Gap Between IT Development and IT Operations Teams
Rising operating expenses, increasing competition, infrastructure complexity and declining budgets strain an organization's ability to deliver products and services on time and against defined business goals. The cost of a missed software delivery deadline or downtime to business services, such as a retail website that crashes during a peak time or poor video quality of a major sporting event, can be detrimental in terms of competitive advantage and profit loss.

A key obstacle for efficiently and quickly delivering these services is the lack of integration among IT development and IT operations teams. Currently, the process used to move applications from design through production is often manual and error-prone, resulting in slower time-to-market, longer resolution cycles and increased revenue loss.

In order to bridge this gap and provide complete service lifecycle management spanning development, operations and delivery, IBM has combined leading components of its Rational and Tivoli software offerings to help organizations improve the development, production and delivery of services by integrating and automating processes across their development, test and operations teams. Combining these software portfolios gives businesses better control of the creation, testing and performance of the services they provide to customers, as well as shorten the time to market of new services, and make it easier for organizations to demonstrate compliance with industry regulations.

For example, an insurance company in Asia was looking to improve time-to-market of new insurance services that its customers could access online. The process of creating development was not aligned with the process used to deploy the service into production. Using integration between Rational and Tivoli to align their software delivery processes -- Rational automates the build cycle and then releases it to Tivoli to automatically deploy it onto servers in production. The integrated solution aligns development and delivery processes, ensuring auditable, traceable software delivery, faster build and deployment cycles, reduced risk of production roll-backs, and lower overall cost of delivery.

To better manage the rollout of these new and integrated offerings, IBM is also announcing new business services for implementing a service management strategy. The planning and implementing phases utilize IBM's global intellectual capital, reduce the cost of technology integration, and improve service levels. IBM IT Management Consulting Services helps clients establish an IT service strategy with a defined IT service portfolio and a service catalog.

The new integrated software offerings include:

• Rational Test Lab Manager and Tivoli Provisioning Manager and Tivoli Application Dependency and Discovery Manager: Helps companies accelerate time to market by streamlining the discovery and provisioning of test lab and production environments. The integration allows companies to take advantage of IT provisioning automation during application testing for faster, more effective quality control.
• Rational Performance Tester and Tivoli Composite Application Manager: Increases application and service uptime by replicating 'real world' environments for faster testing and problem resolution. The products integrate performance data to speed performance tuning and problem resolution.
• Rational Asset Manager & Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database: Improve the speed and quality of application delivery by integrating asset data across development and operations.
• Rational ClearQuest and Tivoli Service Request Manager: Integrates problem and ticket information across service support and development fix tracking systems to help companies address, resolve, and communicate the status of problem resolution more quickly by synchronizing service support and fix tracking systems
• Rational Software Architect and Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager: Accelerate application and service delivery by modeling application deployment environments based on live configuration data.
  

New Approach to Software Delivery
Building new services is half the battle. The software delivery process is critical and becoming more complex due to dispersed teams, lack of standard tools and poor business processes. To address these challenges, IBM is announcing new and enhanced software delivery solutions to improve the automation of development tasks and team collaboration, provide a deeper view of IT building blocks, and streamline asset lifecycle management making approved assets more readily accessible to collaborative development teams. The new and enhanced products include:

• Rational System Architect and Rational Focal Point - combining these products provide a powerful vehicle for doing trade-off analysis and prioritization.
• Rational Quality Manager - new enhancements provide businesses with the intelligence needed to understand and control sources of risk with risk ranking and assessment and discovering and preventing duplicate defects.
• IBM Rational Team Concert and IBM Rational Asset Manager - combing these products helps streamline asset lifecycle management making approved assets more readily accessible to collaborative development teams by enabling developers to federate an asset's metadata with the related Jazz Application Lifecycle Managed resources and work items.