IBM Rational's application development solutions help you maximize the return on your mobile technology, web, and other middleware investments, equipping your team to respond with agility and effectiveness to rapidly evolving business objectives. Sessions in this area of interest will explore agile, traditional and hybrid methods for end-to-end design, development, testing and deployment of software for professionals building enterprise web applications, apps for mobile platforms, delivering applications to the Cloud or integrating software across multi-platform systems to create new systems-of-systems.

IBM solutions and technologies help best-in-class companies to architect and design products, systems, and software that drive market advantage. Providing benefit to architects, business analysts, systems engineers, lead developers, and those responsible for design, sessions will feature best practices, methodologies, demos and real-life experiences. In addition to treating architecture and design as a discreet topic and a model-based approach as critical to success, sessions will focus on architectural frameworks including defense related (DODAF, MODAF, UPDM) and frameworks for architecting large systems-of-systems. Our software focused sessions will detail patterns and practices (SOA, mobile, web, AUTOSAR) that aid in the creation of robust, resilient software architectures. A strong commitment to architecture and design will be shown as the most effective method to manage product, system, and software complexity.

In order to optimize software delivery, organizations must focus on streamlining the flow of information and removing critical bottlenecks. One way to achieve this is through automation of software assembly and delivery processes. As software and IT environments become increasingly complex as they leverage new paradigms such as virtualization and cloud, and the pressure to be agile accelerates the pace of software delivery, the key to enhanced productivity, repeatability, and reliability lies in solutions and best practices covered in this area of interest. Sessions in this area of interest will address how you to automate processes simplify and accelerate software delivery and dramatically improve efficiency and costs.

Enterprise architecture (EA) enables you to align business and technical capabilities with your business model by identifying candidates for consolidation, discovering opportunities for reuse, and deploying solutions that conform to enterprise standards. This approach can help control operating costs, manage technical risks, and assure that your complex connected systems will work well together. With enterprise architecture you can envision and work toward future states of the enterprise or of individual business units and chart a path toward building out the capabilities that your organization requires to be competitive, agile, and mission-focused. In addition, when EA is coupled with application portfolio management (APM), that combination can improve the overall results for business and IT. Sessions will focus on defense-related (DoDAF), large commercial and government enterprises (TOGAF and other EA frameworks) as well as showing how decision makers, architects and stakeholders collaborate on the impact of business initiatives and change by effectively managing enterprise-wide information.

Contrary to popular opinion, application development for IBM i, AIX and Linux on Power and PureSystems is vibrant and state-of-the-art. Gone are the days when there were no other choices than to use "green screen" interfaces to create, enhance, and maintain these applications. By implementing Rational development solutions for IBM i, AIX and Linux on Power, organizations can maximize resources—people and money— as they employ modern tools, agile methodologies, and build mobile applications which integrate with enterprise applications all from an integrated development and test platform. Sessions in this area of interest focus on how our solutions help clients provide business innovation and lower operating costs, while at the same time boosting individual and team productivity and application performance.

Is your organization challenged to find enterprise development solutions that enable you to act nimbly? Do you use tools that allow multi-platform developers to flow easily from task to task while working on a complex mix of applications? The IBM enterprise modernization approach is one of continuous improvement that enables you to revitalize applications, leverage existing skills and attract new talent, unify teams and optimize your infrastructure -- all with the goal of helping you make breakthroughs in IT productivity, efficiency, and innovation. Sessions in this area of interest will showcase the latest tools and compilers from IBM as well as success stories and best practices from our customers and partners covering application discovery, analysis, portfolio management, multi-platform development and test, application deployment, and lifecycle management.

Developing and testing mobile applications can be very exciting and challenging. There is high expectation from users on the usability and quality of your mobile application. At the same time, you have to deal with fragmented set of mobile devices, platforms and programming models (Web, native, and hybrid), and integration with a wide-range of back-end systems. Alignment and collaboration between the mobile front-end and back-end services teams are essential to ensuring that time-to-market requirements and quality goals are met. Sessions in this area of interest will address solutions to manage the complexity of developing and testing mobile applications in an agile team environment.

Many companies have realized that delivering higher quality products, systems, and software requires a collaborative and optimized quality management process integrated with sound testing practices. Sessions in this area of interest will address ways to execute testing that matters - including exploratory, integration, functional, and performance testing. They will also address how service virtualization can significantly increase your efficiency, reduce testing costs, reduce risk and accelerate software delivery.

Requirements management encompasses all of the activities in software delivery that revolve around eliciting, defining, elaborating, understanding, organizing, reviewing, communicating and tracking business, user, and software requirements. The importance of role played by business analysts in developing the right software and applications at the right time has become ever more important in today's fast moving and competitive world. Requirements engineering is the corner stone of systems engineering and requirements engineers play a key role in developing complex systems quicker to the market and adhering to industry compliance requirements. Sessions in this area of interest explore the experiences of organizations with tools, techniques, and processes used to effectively define and manage requirements. Best practices in the domain of requirements engineering, business analysis, and methodologies for defining and managing requirements will be discussed in the form of case studies and presentations.

Change and configuration management (CCM) and effective team collaboration are core foundations in every development and delivery organization. Sessions in this area of interest will address agile, formal and hybrid planning, reporting, source code management, change management and workflow automation, all integrated on the Jazz platform.

Today, agile practices are being adopted in virtually every industry to deliver software driven innovations from mobile applications to safety critical medical devices. Leveraging agile has proven to provide organizations with a competitive edge, allowing these organizations to deliver working products faster and with higher quality. Sessions in this area of interest will cover the spectrum of the agile journey, including tips for successful agile adoption, techniques for extending agile practices to large and distributed teams and practical guidance on how to effectively scale agile to address issues such as regulatory compliance, outsourcing, and complex multi-platform and embedded systems development.

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data. Sessions in this area of interest will help attendees learn how to leverage big data to improve their existing processes, detect potential problems more quickly and understand how their customers feel about their products and services.

On today's Smarter Planet, enterprises are turning to the cloud to revamp existing business models while managing an unprecedented rate of change. In fact, the number of enterprises moving to cloud computing will double within the next few years as they seek to transform enterprise IT into a strategic center of business innovation. Sessions in this area of interest will focus on IBM SmartCloud and IBM Rational offerings that leverage the cloud to deliver development and test environments or simplify and accelerate software delivery, exploring how clients can successfully establish the right foundation of public, private or hybrid cloud environments.

Now is the time for collaborative DevOps! To realize the full competitive and economic benefits from IT investments, technology leaders are implementing bold strategies like collaborative DevOps to both improve the quality and accelerate the delivery of innovative applications and services. Sessions in this area of interest will address best practices for aligning development and operations, including collaboration and communication strategy, process integration and automation, “pre-release to production” application performance optimization, cooperative problem lifecycle management and the use of Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) for tool integration.

We are in the midst of an extraordinary technology shift driving growth and innovation. The confluence of big data, cloud, mobile and social technologies is transforming the way we find and engage customers, source our supply chains, and manage critical information and business processes. Sessions in this area of interest will showcase the latest solutions and integrations from IBM, highlighting success stories and best practices from our customers and partners leveraging system z, Power Systems, PureSystems, and distributed environments, with a special focus on Rational solutions supporting these platforms. customers, manage back-office processes and fund innovation.

Increase quality but deliver faster and at a lower cost. Despite the obvious contradictions in these goals, this is what is demanded from product development and IT teams. As products and applications dramatically increase in complexity, so does the development process. And demand for more and more functionality continues to increase, as does the number of stakeholders needing to provide input throughout the process. Yet “siloed” teams with data and knowledge in multiple, isolated repositories make traceability across development artifacts an elusive goal. Sessions in this area of interest will focus on best practices and the latest capabilities for breaking down those silos and accelerating continuous delivery while reducing the high costs and risks of inefficient, disconnected activities.

Interested in transforming business via mobile? You are not alone. As mobile usage continues to grow worldwide, developing five star mobile applications is becoming increasingly important for businesses motivated to interact with their customers and employees via mobile. Although some aspects of mobile applications development are the same as that of traditional software, mobile development and delivery has many unique challenges. Sessions in this area of interest focus on the values of comprehensive team-based mobile development lifecycle solutions that help ensure that applications are delivered on-time with high quality and meet business objectives.

Having invested heavily in the packaged applications like SAP, Oracle or any custom developed applications, how do you face the challenge of implementing change across these applications? Harness end-to-end business processes across the applications in your organization to ensure business continuity and accelerated innovation. Sessions in this area of interest will provide valuable insights on unifying the delivery of in-house and outsourced SAP projects.

Portfolio, demand and delivery management helps companies reduce waste and increase business value by managing the end-to-end lifecycle. As the marketplace works today and with the business climate we face, organizations need to secure that they “do the right things” and “do things right,” focusing on activities where they will gain most value, within the boundaries of organizational strategy and business objectives. Along with portfolio management and demand and delivery management as discreet topics, sessions will also highlight how to bring together these topics to showcase the latest techniques for managing IT from strategy to delivery in order to resolve more complex IT challenges, including, for example, application portfolio management. Sessions will focus on best practices and real-life experiences on how to capture the voice of the customer, ideas, requirements, projects and more and then bring this forward in the process in order to prioritize, evaluate, compare, visualize and plan for optimized portfolios supporting business needs.

Today’s products and systems are smarter than ever, due primarily to intelligence enabled by software. However, this intelligence is delivered through an exponential increase in the number of features, leading to unsurpassed levels of complexity in both the product and the development process. Product optimization requires that engineering disciplines become more interdependent; engineers can no longer operate in silos, but must collaborate from the earliest stages of product development while shrinking time to market, increasing product quality, and addressing the needs and desires of demanding consumers. Sessions in this area of interest focus on the integration of engineering disciplines, alignment of business and engineering objectives, innovation management, and “systems of systems” and will illustrate best practices for product development, systems engineering, and inter-discipline collaboration as applied to the development of smarter products and systems.

Today's product portfolios must be driven by market analysis, complete stakeholder collaboration, and ultimately, customer and business value. Sessions in this area of interest will help organizations identify key factors that can impact product and portfolio management performance and client relationships resulting in a portfolio that balances the needs of the market and aligns with strategic goals.

Software continues to drive innovation and differentiation in smarter products and embedded systems, delivering business value through compelling new features and functions. But the software component in smarter products also presents challenging new layers of complexity for development organizations. Sessions in this area of interest will address how to apply best practices and collaborative tooling to bring software intensive products and systems to market faster with reduced cost and improved quality while meeting compliance objectives.

Industry research combined with high profile breaches have illustrated that vulnerable applications remain a dominant threat to today's organizations. As online business grows, new challenges for meeting application security and compliance emerge, resulting in the need for greater security measures. Traditional reactive or manual security assessment approaches are cost prohibitive, fall short of effectively protecting an organization, and cannot facilitate ongoing compliance requirements. Security needs to be built in from the beginning; not bolted on as an afterthought and must be considered from the early stages of development throughout the final phases of implementation. Sessions in this area of interest focus on the fundamentals of application security — analysis techniques, innovations, and best practice approaches for integrating security testing across the development lifecycle. Emerging threats and common attack types are also explored.

Social business can create valued customer experiences, increase workforce productivity and effectiveness and accelerate innovation. Sessions in this area of interest will help attendees understand how to derive enormous business value, create sustainable competitive advantage, and realize real business transformation and results by embracing social business.

Every year organizations spend billions of dollars on activities and projects delivered in collaboration with other organizations, including new initiatives, upgrades or maintenance. These activities and projects often increase the risk of delivering late and over budget, without meeting original specifications or business needs. Excessive rework and delays often result from a poor understanding of business needs, poor visibility into the progress of work across multiple suppliers and the inability to easily manage changes during the lifecycle of the contract. While a multi supplier deliver model is a common solution for software and systems development initiatives, there are many risks and pitfalls associated with managing these relationships. Sessions in this area of interest will help you understand how you can take advantage of the innovative approaches in multi supplier initiatives in order to maximize business outcomes and investment value and provide insight into how risk can be mitigated and pitfalls avoided.

Systems engineering is the key to driving innovation in the product development process, helping organizations deliver smarter products by enabling collaboration and integration across the product lifecycle. Successful products and systems result from precise requirements that are traced throughout the development process, from insights revealed by architecture and behavior modeling, from collaboration among multiple teams and engineering disciplines, and from quality metrics tracked and enforced throughout development. Sessions in this area of interest focus on leveraging the discipline of systems engineering to successfully manage innovation of software intensive products, product lines, and systems.

The application development landscape is changing. Developers are being asked to develop and deliver new, innovative applications faster than ever before— applications that can be accessed anywhere over a myriad of connected devices. Developers must also efficiently consume new technologies, open standards, and programming models to deliver modern applications that are relevant in today’s marketplace. This track will let you get your hands on the easy to use tools that can help you maximize productivity and quickly bring new applications to market.

Improve our customer's time to value by providing more prescriptive guidance and simplifying the deployment of Rational solutions. This track will focus on the broader aspects of Rational deployment including: designing, installing, configuring, integrating, upgrading, and administrating Rational environments. Further, it will focus on the non-functional requirements for Rational environments, particularly: flexibility, scalability, performance, high-availability, disaster recovery and administration. This track is specifically aimed at Rational Administrators and the Rational Field, who deploy the development environments our customers depend upon to develop the software and systems their business depends upon.

Reporting across the life cycle is a key activity in software delivery that revolves around understanding the data that is created and managed throughout the requirements, development, testing, and deploying of software development projects. The importance of connecting this data together with data from other parts of a business process has become ever more important in today's fast moving and competitive world. Managing your data and being able to report on progress during a project is the corner stone of systems engineering and plays a key role in developing complex systems quicker to the market and adhering to industry compliance requirements. Sessions in this track explore the experiences of organizations with tools, techniques, and processes used to effectively measure, manage and report on the business. Best practices in the domain of reporting, engineering, and business analysis will be discussed in the form of case studies and presentations.

Let us introduce you to a variety of IBM Rational solutions that enable businesses to deliver products and services in a more productive, effective, predictable and prioritized way. Come learn something new, to help improve the way you develop and deliver software and systems and ultimately unleash innovation.

Today's rapidly changing business challenges have caused technology to become an even more critical piece in how a business operates. Software and systems delivery is the way to new efficiencies, differentiated products and services, and opportunities that come with change. This track showcases how IBM and IBM Business Partner solutions and technologies help organizations manage their software investments and enable them to do more with less. Sessions include real life case studies, details on integrations with IBM Rational products, tips and tricks, and technical solutions that are changing the way companies do business.

Science fiction author William Gibson is quoted as saying, "The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed." Together, Rational and IBM Research are investigating, envisioning, and inventing the future of software and systems engineering. This track gives you insights into how the world is changing, what it means for your development organization and your business, and what we can do to take advantage of these changes. Presentations range from general technology outlooks to specific investigations and prototypes to address the problems you will be confronting — sooner than you think. Top researchers and development experts are on hand to answer your questions.