ALM on IBM SmartCloud

IBM announced the PaaS component of SmartCloud. It will be available from ‘qualified IBM Business Parters’ from ‘early 2012’.

There is little buzz on the IBM cloud stack, probably due to it being fairly closed and only available from the channel. I also can’t really say much about how it measures against other cloud stacks, although it does seem to be a WebSphere oriented with a DB2 database. There probably is some cloud washing going on, but until people have had some hands on experience and report back, we won’t really know.

What I did find interesting and worthwhile pointing out is that the Rational ALM products are part of the offering. To me this is a big indication that PaaS is moving out of the startup culture to a more enterprise friendly set of tools. While rolling your own ALM tools with Github, Jira and self maintained CI environments may be cool and the current trend, it doesn’t lend itself to an integrated platform that can provide all that is needed. Amazon doesn’t have anything for ALM and Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) still doesn’t run as an Azure service. TFS and similar tools are non trivial to set up, require ongoing maintenance and should be offered as a service.

Enterprises have different software development practices (read: needs) to the current users of cloud platforms. Whether those practices exist because they have been buying software from IBM, or because they have different complexities is an open debate (although I think it is a combination of both). The fact remains that ALM (and the ‘Rational’ stuff of task and requirements management) is a big deal for enterprise development shops – so a PaaS offering that has these familiar tools helps the management transition. Coupled with integration with existing management and monitoring tools (IBM Systems Director and Windows Azure/SCOM) the new breed of proprietary PaaS products that integrate with existing process and monitoring will get the attention of the IT director.

So while OpenStack and CloudFoundry argue about what should be in the application stack they are ignoring the broader needs such as ALM. Established vendors (IBM. Microsoft, Oracle) may sweep the floor with their existing arsenal of products that are (hopefully but unlikely) engineered for PaaS platforms. There is also the risk that in a vacuum of solutions all the bad practices from enterprise development that are counter-cloud will find their way into cloud development practices and (shudder) architectures.

Simon Munro

@simonmunro