A chance to talk with Danny Sabbah (General Manager, Rational Software) at the London Rational Software Developers Conference (RSDC) is not to be missed—but more of that anon.

First, I was impressed at the conference by the sense of "life" in Rational these days—well, in the Rational brand as a whole—with acquisitions like Telelogic and BuildForge, Rational has come a long way from the 400 employee Rational around 1993/94 (pre-IBM). I think IBM's Rational brand may be about to surprise us with its agility—rumour has it that the next version of RUP (Rational Unified Process), for example, will be based on OUP (Open Unified Process). OUP isn't a cut-down RUP but a rethink on RUP, by some of its original architects, to provide something more open and lower-ceremony—more Agile. Not before time, in my opinion, as having a vendor's brand on what should be a universal, intellectually-rigorous and abstracted process behind a tool vendor implementation seems all wrong to me (see my article here).

Jazz itself really impresses me—and Sabbah seems to have a strong roadmap vision for it. I've heard people claim that Team Concert (the first Jazz tool released) is currently a bit lacking in "heavy-lifting" capabilities compared to more established tools such as ClearCase but that's not really the point. If other non-IBM tool vendors find that they can't easily deploy on the Jazz platform, that would be a serious issue, of course—it's Jazz the platform that's important—but Team Concert's light "just enough ceremony" approach is different to that of more established tools and that may be important in itself.

Jazz already uses OUP, not RUP; and BPMI modelling instead of UML (much easier for some developers, and end users, to get into); just a couple of signs that Jazz is a ground-up revisit of the developer tool environment.

According to Sabbah, he's seeing "viral" adoption of Jazz, even though the enterprise edition won't be available until next year (and he looks at emerging scalability from two points of view: the number of projects/users it can support; and also the number of different tools it can support). Sabbah really doesn't see the Eclipse-style Open Source model as at all appropriate for Jazz, which is a globally deployable web-centric infrastructure, not just a desktop-oriented framework, but he does see Jazz as an open platform supporting many non-IBM tools (using Jazz the other way round, as a "service" for other frameworks, would be harder, he admits).

Interestingly, Sabbah says that the Telelogic people that IBM acquired are adopting Jazz enthusiastically as an enabler for their own ideas about a web-centric architecture for developer tools, which they bought with them to IBM.

Sabbah seems very aware of the need to keep the 80% of his customers who aren't into "pretty awesome new stuff" happy while not blocking them off from moving to the new ideas in their own time. This seems to be a pretty mature approach, to me—although it might make IBM look staid compared to small start-ups without legacy customers to support.

I did ask Sabbah about offering governance for end-user business mashups and he seemed to say that this was on the Jazz roadmap although it wasn't being pushed explicitly yet. I think that some form of (transparent) configuration management, at the least, around Business Mashups is essential if we are to avoid replaying the end-user spreadsheet chaos of the 1990s. However, we have a little time as I don't see widespread adoption of business mashups for anything "mission-critical" yet (but remember that the widespread adoption of spreadsheets for mission-critical stuff rather crept up on the IT department from nowhere in the 1990s).

Serena (by no means small start-up but nothing like as big as IBM Rational) seems to be taking the lead here but, while Sabbah is concentrating on the 80% plus who (for the moment) have no intention of using something as potentially uncontrolled as "web 2.0" business mashups for anything important, Serena seems to be targeting the top slice of innovators and early adopters. And, by the way, after a period of stressing innovation over governance, I'm glad to see Serena's Business Mashups website now stresses its undoubted governance capabilities too. We shall have to see which approach to delivering industrial-strength end user computing works better in the long term.

Finally, I had a "user experience" thing with Second Life at RSDC. Grady Booch was present in Avatar form—and, frankly, I wouldn't want to share the stage with an avatar (even if it does have a smart "sergeant major stance", shoulders back, chest out, as Avatar Grady did. Grady lost connection at one point, which rather spoiled the build-up to Erich Gamma's keynote, and we wasted a fair bit of time watching an avatar in confusion, looking for its life-support system. As Sabbah admitted afterwards, Second Life isn't capable of supporting a sustainable collaborative development environment—yet…

Nevertheless, I think it will in the not-too-distant future (although face to face meetings will always be an important part of building trust relationships maintained in Cyberspace, I think). Just like the use of end-user business mashups for integrating IT into the business, virtual collaboration is nowhere near mainstream yet—but it is something that companies should be aware of and allow for in long-term strategic planning.