Innovate 2012: Find Out What's Next—Now

Innovate your way to a better business outcome

Tivoli Beat. A weekly IBM service management perspective.

Getting ahead in a competitive market is all about delivering what your customers want—faster, more consistently, and more cost-effectively than your competitors can. It is, in short, all about innovation.

And in today's digital, IT services-driven world, software development plays a key role in making that innovation a reality. That's why attending Innovate 2012, to be held at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort from June 3-7 in Orlando, is an investment likely to pay ample dividends.

Historically, this event has explored how the IBM Rational development portfolio offers extraordinary value by helping organizations create software in a governed, prioritized fashion. When new builds are feature-complete, as bug-free as possible, and delivered on time and within budget, they're much more likely to perform as expected, and thus create the intended value.

Because the field of software development itself continues to be driven by innovation, though, new trends in recent years have led to optimizations and solutions that involve not just development, but operations as well.

What kinds of trends are we talking about? Consider:

Application lifecycle management that spans all phases and operating environments, including both IT development and IT operations. The idea is to maximize the total holistic value applications create not just by enhancing every phase of the lifecycle, but also linking those phases logically, instead of treating them as separate worlds.
Information sharing across domains and tools. IT operations and IT development teams have historically worked in isolation from each other; each group thus has had exclusive information that isn't accessible to the other. However, when the tools those groups use are integrated, to draw information as needed from across that divide, both groups will benefit—and so will the organization as a whole.
Shared usage of optimized infrastructures. As dynamic new architectures like clouds emerge, they can be, and should be, used by both IT operations and IT development. This is a really effective way to ensure the cloud's total business value is as high as possible.

Consider also that IBM, as a world leader in both development (via IBM Rational) and operations (via IBM Tivoli) is almost uniquely positioned to help organizations pursue these ideas—not just by developing best practices, but in providing the actual solutions used to make those best practices an up-and-running reality.

For readers of Tivoli Beat, attending Innovate 2012 will thus offer an outstanding, concentrated opportunity to learn about everything IBM has to offer in that area, and all the ways they themselves stand to benefit as a result.

A compelling keynote explores IBM's vision of DevOps collaboration

Looking for more specifics? One particular track, titled Collaborative Development and Operations, will zero in on exactly these topics—and of the show's 400 technical sessions, the 16 in this track are likely to be of the most direct interest to Tivoli clients.

"For readers of Tivoli Beat, attending Innovate 2012 will offer an outstanding, concentrated opportunity to learn about everything IBM has to offer in that area, and all the ways they themselves stand to benefit as a result."

Kicking off this track will be a keynote by Jamie Thomas (VP of Tivoli Strategy and Development) and Harish Grama (VP of Rational Product Development and Delivery and Customer Support). This keynote will concern the increasing number and scope of challenges faced by organizations today, and the new power that development/operations collaboration offers to help resolve those challenges.

Market agility, for instance, is more important than ever at a time of high customer expectations and extraordinary competition. It's not enough simply to deliver new services; you have to deliver them faster and better than the other guy. Regulation compliance gets more complex by the year, as new regulations are released by more governments, and each national boundary an organization crosses implies an entirely new set of regulations with which to comply. Additional challenges include legacy, domain-specific management processes and increased infrastructural complexity, both of which threaten to slow new service releases and diminish the competitive edge those services might otherwise have delivered.

In this keynote, you'll hear how IBM's vision of development/operations collaboration can help address all of those concerns, and many more besides. You'll find out why now is the time to drive up business agility, strategy execution, and performance—and hear about everything IBM has to offer to make that happen. And you'll also learn how IBM itself has utilized its own solutions, best practices, and innovative insights to foster superior cross-domain collaboration—as backed up by the experience of a major client from the healthcare sector, whose adoption of IBM concepts and solutions has led to a truly impressive outcome.

Sixteen sessions hit cross-domain collaboration from many angles

Of course, the joint keynote is only the beginning of the story for this track, which will offer 16 different sessions (all in the Oceanic 8 room) that hit on many new and compelling development/operation possibilities.

One session likely to interest Tivoli clients, for instance, will be "End To End Application Quality and Availability Management using ITCAM for Transactions and Rational Functional Tester." This will provide a clear illustration of how, through integrating Tivoli and Rational tools, IBM can offer a better outcome—not just better software builds, but software builds that are also a better fit for the production environment in which they will ultimately run. The special power of the Tivoli solution (to trace performance issues of composite applications to their root causes) will be shown as logically connected to and augmented by the power of the Rational solution (to accelerate and improve software build testing through intelligent automation).

Or, on the subject of how both development and operations can benefit from a shared platform, consider attending "Rational's Role in Provisioning for the Cloud—How the Multi-Brand Puzzle Fits Together." Cloud architectures are often seen primarily as production environments for up-and-running software, but they are just as effective as development environments. In part, that's because in a cloud, new test servers can be provisioned with incredible speed and consistency, leading ultimately to higher-quality builds that are delivered into production more rapidly—a recipe for market agility.

And if you're really interested in combining IT development and IT operations into a cohesive, seamless team—DevOps, in a word—one great way to go about it is to link team members not just via shared tools, and shared technical data, but shared social collaboration. The human side of enhanced interaction and faster process execution is just as important as the technical side, and IBM is in an excellent position to show you how that enhancement might actually work. Attend "DevOps: Building One Team Through Integrated Social Collaboration" to find out more!

Four Tivoli-specific pedestals

Finally, Innovate 2012 will also offer four pedestals spotlighting Tivoli-driven capabilities in these areas:

Cloud DevOps and Continuous Delivery
Application Performance Management
Deployment Planning and Automation for cloud
Problem Lifecycle Management

Interested in getting up to speed on how these capabilities apply to both development and operations? Register to attend the event today!

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Innovate2012 - The premier event for software and systems innovation

Innovate 2012 is the software innovation conference focused on helping you transform software innovation and accelerate better business outcomes. Sign up for the Collaborative Development and Operations track to learn how to design, deliver and manage innovative services more quickly and effectively. Don't miss Innovate 2012, June 3-7, 2012.

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