First off, a special welcome to my fellow Rational conference attendees and anyone else who arrived via the DeveloperWorks Conference Blogs link (if you can find me there, I’m buried at the bottom of the page ;).
While it’s a bit less of a spectacle than its Partnerworld cousin might be, this year’s Rational conference at the Mandalay Bay kicked off fairly well. The passing of the reins from Rational founder Mike Devlin (who’s retiring) to new GM Danny Sabbah seems to be fairly seamless, and hasn’t seemed to ruffle many feathers thus far. And given what Danny, Lee Nackman and co pulled off during this morning’s keynote – a demo of SOA building via Rational tools that didn’t immediately put everyone to sleep [1] – it would appear that Rational’s in good hands.
What I found interesting in the keynote and subsequent press conference, however, were the subtle but clear signs that Rational is an organization in transition. I don’t mean that in a melodramatic sense, but rather that like the rest of IBM they are adapting to a rapidly changing IT and application development landscape. Open source and the growth of alternative platform technologies represent at once an opportunity and threat, and Rational is clearly processing the implications in both dimensions.
Fortunately, Sabbah’s an executive who gets the opportunity side of that particular equation. Not only was he a major factor in the original Eclipse contribution, his answer to my question on what role technologies like PHP will play within Rational going forward was very solid. Essentially, he’s confident that PHP specifically, and platforms like Gluecode implicitly, will only grow in importance within the enterprise, a predication I happen to agree with. Further, he promised, customers should expect to see Rational embrace this trend, although he didn’t provide much in the way of specifics. I’m not sure that I concur entirely with his view of the technologies as primarily good enough, as I’m seeing some fairly sophisticated solutions built from the likes of PHP, but I think we agree more than we disagree.
Whatever your take on the capabilities of the platforms, however, it’s clear that from a volume perspective alone Rational’s got a major untapped opportunity in front of it. In object oriented (OO) shops, Rational’s been a fixture for years – I’m exhibit A of this, having been Rational trained on several occasions over the course of my career. That’s good, in the sense that it’s a solid installed base to build from, but also challenging from a market saturation perspective. Amongst the scripters, it’s a totally different story. The need, of course, for Rational functionality is lessened in scripting projects as the overall complexity tends to be dramatically reduced, but there are opportunities for the vendor nonetheless.
Looking at recent trends within the application development space, the $64,000 question in my mind becomes something like GlueCode/Zend is to WebSphere as X is to Rational. I’m sure I won’t get an answer to that speculation here, but it’s definitely worth chewing on I think.
[1] Though I could have done without the jingle voices for the various roles, DEVELOPPPPPEEEER!, etc. They reminded me of the hilarious Will Ferrell / Oracle Conclave skit (I’m not sure if I can name who gave me this file to me or not – let me know if I can).
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