06.12.07
The Other Rumor
Forgive us for being, literally, an hour and a day late, but IBM’s announced offer to buy Telelogic caught us yesterday on the morning after being forced to Tivo the Sopranos final blank screen (we still haven’t had the time to catch the last episode yet).
But we couldn’t let this one escape without comment. When we first caught the rumors that Telelogic had attracted a buyout offer last week, IBM was among the furthest from our mind. We thought that some of the other ALM (application lifecycle management) vendors with greater gaps in their offerings would have made more logical suitors.
But our miscues were attributable to our getting unnecessarily hung up over the fact that Telelogic’s best known product, the Doors requirement management tool, is IBM/Rational Requisite Pro’s largest rival. Aside from buying raw market share, both tools are at least 10 – 20 years old and have installed bases that are pretty much not likely to migrate anywhere anytime soon.
But we forgot that Telelogic has a jewel that’s been a clear gap for IBM: The System Architect enterprise architecture tool that would make a valuable addition to the Rational portfolio, not to mention a trove of consulting opportunities for IBM Global Services. Telelogic also has several other tools geared toward modeling and testing of real-time systems. So on closer inspection, Telelogic’s markets, which have heavily skewed towards highly complex systems especially in public and telco sectors, largely complement rather than duplicate those of Rational’s, which are about complex enterprise systems in more commercial (e.g., financial services) sectors.
So on second thought, if the offer is accepted, it doesn’t look like a bad deal for IBM. It’s a form of circling of the wagons to solidify the higher end of the requirements, architecture, and modeling market. It’s clearly not about reaching out to the newer forms of development, such as agile, with lighter, simpler tools (Doors and ReqPro are 10 – 20 year old products not known for ease of use).
In that light, we were a bit amused at an incredibly appropriate question from one of our colleagues during the Q&A, on what IBM/Rational is getting itself into by acquiring a company that has made similarly scant progress in integrating its tools.
Danny Sabbah’s answer (he heads IBM’s Rational business unit) was a bit telling, in that it unintentionally shed light on the fact that the cowboy culture in software development is far from dead: “We had some serious discussions with the engineers. They love their tools. They focus a lot more on the maturity of the tools than they do on the integration.”