"Absolutely we're going to be more and more of that in our tools." "Developers want to build more sophisticated things with less and less skill," Nackman said. Eclipse 3.0 user interface is a lot easier to use, a lot more modern and more appealing." "A lot of the reason we moved to the Eclipse framework was for improving usability.
"Usability is our first priority in the next 12 months pricing is second to that," Devlin said. That will make the tools more palatable for a broader developer audience. Though IBM Rational tools have appealed mainly to highly skilled developers, Devlin and Lee Nackman, IBM Rational CTO, said the forthcoming Atlantic release should make the tools accessible for less code-savvy application builders. IBM Rational gave developers a sneak peak of Atlantic, expected before the end of the year, at the conference Monday in Dallas. The competition between Microsoft and IBM Rational could heat up even further with the upcoming Atlantic release of IBM Rational's desktop practitioner tools-which include the Rational Rose modeling tool, the Rational Robot testing tool and WebSphere Studio IDE for J2EE development. "I don't expect that to change," said Devlin.
"There are views that Microsoft is a bad company and if they don't like you they don't give you access to technology, but our view is that they are a good company to work with, they have great ISV programs, and they give you what you need to make your product available on their platforms."Įven so, Microsoft and IBM Rational are doing "less joint marketing than we used to" and hardly any joint selling now since IBM bought Rational, he said. "They still give us access to all the APIs and technology," Devlin said.
In an interview with CRN at the show, however, IBM Rational General Manager Mike Devlin admitted that the relationship between Rational and Microsoft has cooled since IBM acquired Rational in February 2003.ĭevlin said the "good news" is that Microsoft is still a "good engineering partner" for IBM Rational.