New IBM Technology Speeds, Simplifies Discovery and Repair of Business Application Problems

Market Wire, May, 2005

IBM today announced new software that can automatically identify and help repair problems in business applications, allowing companies to fix defects in minutes and hours instead of days and weeks.

IBM software can now measure real-time performance of an application in production, identify defects at the moment they occur, and send key information back to development, enabling the developer to diagnose the precise location of code defects and performance bottlenecks. This allows both the operations and development teams to have a common view of the problem, helping organizations gain the holistic, end-to-end view that is fundamental to IT lifecycle management.

The new offerings blend two parts of IBM's industry-leading middleware portfolio -- Rational development and testing tools and Tivoli application management software -- so development teams that design, build and test applications and the IT operations staffs that run them can share previously siloed information about their performance. This better harmonizing of the application development and deployment areas of an organization will help companies become on demand businesses by providing crucial information in real time and the ability to respond.

The technology was unveiled today at the Rational Software Development Conference, the largest annual gathering for the estimated 4.5 million developers who rely on IBM's standards-based technology.

Until now, the difficulty of development and IT operations teams in sharing information has contributed to companies' reliance on time-consuming processes to pinpoint and repair problems. For example, if a retail Web site can't properly process credit card information or malfunctions when used simultaneously by many customers, it can take hours of manual work recreating scenarios to isolate the problem, identify its root cause in the application's development and decide how to fix it.

Two new offerings -- IBM Problem Resolution Toolkit for Rational Application Developer and IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit for Rational Performance Tester -- enable a faster, automated and more coherent process for problem identification and resolution in business applications. This will particularly benefit companies that are building a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), an infrastructure that flexibly integrates business processes, re-uses existing assets and enables applications to work together more easily within companies and with customers and partners.

With today's announcement, Rational's tools gain trouble-shooting capabilities from Tivoli's Monitoring for Transaction Performance (TMTP) software, which helps customers quickly isolate, diagnose and fix transaction performance problems. Business processes are increasingly dependent on applications that span multiple resources such as Web servers, J2EE application servers, integration middleware and legacy systems.

Here's how the new software works: The Tivoli software monitors application performance and quality while the application is live, tracing and storing details when it identifies performance or quality issues. The IBM Problem Resolution Toolkit enables the developer to access the stored information and quickly isolate the cause of the identified problem down to the source, minimizing downtime.

IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit provides data collectors that are based on Tivoli software during the testing process. After a problem is identified in the test lab, the toolkit uses Tivoli's self-managing autonomic capabilities to suggest probable causes and resolutions. If the probable cause is linked to the application source code, the recorded information can then be shared with the developer for quick resolution.

Because its software development tools are based on Eclipse, an open platform that provides a universal environment for developers, IBM Rational was able to integrate these different technologies inside the same work environment.

"Customers want to be able to bring together business, development and operations teams with common tools and processes so they can manage the entire lifecycle of business applications," said Danny Sabbah, General Manager, IBM Rational Software. "These new IBM products will help customers create and maintain flexible and scalable business applications, particularly in Service Oriented Architectures, so they can sense and quickly respond to business and market changes."

These are just two of several new additions announced today to the IBM Rational Software Development Platform, a comprehensive, standards-based portfolio of tools and best practices for helping development teams collaborate effectively in building and integrating applications that meet business goals.

Speeding Deployment of the IBM Rational Software Development Platform

IBM Rational unveiled a number of new service offerings that help customers more quickly become proficient with tools in the IBM Rational Software Development Platform.

IBM Standard Deployment Service for Rational Portfolio Manager, IBM Fast Track Deployment Service for Rational Portfolio Manager and IBM Rational Project/Program Management Assessment Service, help customers more effectively use IBM Rational's project and portfolio management offering. IBM Rational Portfolio Manager enables business and development teams to maximize the value of their technology investment by providing a comprehensive set of capabilities for prioritizing, planning, managing, and measuring IT projects.