Rational software can help you

Our goal is to enable business innovation and agility. This requires a significant investment in software, both for IT operations and systems development capability.

In today’s market:

• Software is increasingly being managed as a strategic business asset, key to enabling sustained business differentiation and flexible operations.

• Businesses everywhere are deploying increasingly intelligent, interconnected, and instrumented software and products.

• Enabling innovation, lowering costs, and managing change is dependent upon effective software delivery.

Software delivery is a business process that must be continuously measured and improved. IBM Rational offerings include a collaborative software delivery platform, capabilities, and time-tested processes to make software delivery a core business strength.

A key component of the Rational portfolio is Jazz, a technology platform for collaborative software delivery. Uniquely attuned to global and distributed teams, the Jazz platform is designed to transform how people work together to build software—making software delivery more collaborative, productive, and transparent.

The Jazz platform helps teams:

• Collaborate via social networking and virtualized team memory to overcome geographic and temporal gaps in the software lifecycle.

• Automate individual and team workflows throughout the software lifecycle, enabling standardized processes without adding overhead.

• Report on the overall process with real-time insight into programs, projects, and resource utilization, which means teams make better informed decisions and continuously measure progress against desired business outcomes.

These core extensive capabilities are where Rational products and services can help make a difference in your organization’s software needs:

• Architecture management: Design, model, develop and deliver superior software and systems.

• Change and release management: Improve software delivery and lifecycle traceability, from requirements through deployment.

• Enterprise architecture management: Drive the right decisions and plans to deliver on your business transformation.

• Integrated requirements management: Define and manage requirements and provide traceability and alignment with business processes.

• Product, project, and portfolio management: Align business goals, best practices, and projects for improved productivity and predictability.

• Quality management: Ensure software functionality, reliability, compliance, security, and performance throughout development and production.

• Targeted solutions: Solve lifecycle management and governance challenges for industries, SOA, systems and more.

The IBM Rational product offerings listed above help teams automate a tried-and-true process that represents years of field engagements with real customers designing solutions to real business problems. Today, we deliver this expertise through two process frameworks specially designed to power agile software delivery teams: Measured Capability Improvement Framework and Rational practices.

Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF)

How do you know your new approach to software delivery is working? Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF) helps software and systems delivery teams drive business innovation through measured and continuous process improvement. MCIF helps teams gain competency in the core agile development practices that most impact business outcomes.

Rational practices

Provided through IBM Rational Method Composer®, which includes the industry-standard Rational Unified Process, Rational practices allow agile teams the right amount of process discipline when they need it.

Whether your team is just coming up to speed on agile software delivery techniques, or raising their expertise to new levels of capability, Rational practices provide a tailored approach to iterative lifecycle management for faster, more consistent results.

Extensive partner ecosystem

In addition, Rational has an extensive partner ecosystem that provides capabilities for specific industry and technology needs. These include Ready for IBM Rational software business partner solutions that provide both product and consulting expertise to accelerate initiatives.