IBM Unveils New ‘DevOps’ CLM Tools for the Cloud

June 5, 2012 Alex Woodie

IBM yesterday unveiled new software and services designed to help customers streamline the application development lifecycle, or what IBM calls “development operations,” or simply DevOps. As part of the announcement, which was made at the annual Rational Collaborate conference in Florida, parts of Rational’s Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) suite will be made available as a DevOps tool hosted in IBM’s SmartCloud.

The CLM suite, which IBM unveiled at last year’s Collaborate show, is built on IBM’s open development platform, called Jazz, and combines three Rational products, including Requirements Composer, Team Concert, and Quality Manager, in one suite that IBM says is easier to buy, install, and use than separately cobbling the products together.

Big Blue yesterday announced five new CLM products and services as part of its push into DevOps for the cloud. It also announced new mobile capabilities in its CLM suite.

The first DevOps for the Cloud offering bears an unwieldy name: “IBM Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management on IBM SmartCloud Enterprise.” This offering is basically a slice of IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise that a customer can use as a development and test environment. SmartCloud Enterprise, you will remember, is a public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering based on X86 hardware and the Linux OS. SmartCloud Enterprise+ supports Power Systems environments, but not IBM i.

The new IBM SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS) platform as a service (PaaS) offering that was launched in October 2011 also has a role in IBM’s cloud-based DevOps plans. IBM sees SCAS (which includes a Linux OS, WebSphere WAS, DB2 database, and SAP applications) giving customers a place where they can execute development, build, test, and deliver activities.

IBM also announced the SmartCloud for Government Development and Test Platform. This offering will give government agencies a way to access the CLM suite from a scalable, hosted environment. IBM says this offering will comply with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).

Also playing into the DevOps cloud is SmartCloud Continuous Delivery, which IBM describes as a set of “best practice patterns” designed to help customers use CLM tools and IBM’s SmartCloud Provisioning software to manage the lifecycle of cloud-based services. SmartCloud Continuous Delivery was initially unveiled in March, and is currently in beta.

The SmartCloud Application Performance Management offering provides customers with access to Tivoli monitoring and management tools for improving the performance of cloud applications.

On the mobile front, IBM announced that its CLM suite can now work with the IBM Mobile Foundation. The Mobile Foundation, in case you missed it, combines three tools, including the IBM Worklight HTML5 mobile application development and runtime environment; the IBM Endpoint Manager tool; and WebSphere Cast Iron for integration.

The new Enterprise Mobile Development offering combines CLM, the Mobile Foundation, and several other Rational tools, including the new Rational Developer for Power Systems version 8.5 release (which you can read more about here), Rational Developer for System z 8.5, Rational Application Developer 8.5, and the Android SDK and Emulator. IBM says that by integrating all this stuff, customers can expect to speed up the process of designing, developing, testing, and deploying enterprise mobile apps, and doing so in a secure and compliant manner.

It’s a wide, wily cloud world out there, and IBM is determined to help customers cut through the clutter and manage their cloud application development activities. “Today’s business dilemma is how to address both the need for rapid delivery and sufficient control in the software development process,” Dr. Kristof Kloeckner, general manager of IBM Rational, says in a press release. “We must balance the need for speed and agility with better governance to manage cost and quality, achieve regulatory compliance, ensure security, and have some level of financial predictability.”