On September 20, we posted Beta 2 (“CLM Beta 2 is available!”) of the CLM products. If you’ve been following closely, you may be wondering why you see Rational Team Concert’s latest milestone posted as Release Candidate RC1, and Rational Quality Manager posted as Milestone M10, so I’d like to give you an update on how we are staging our CLM deliverables.

As I wrote in my June blog post, the CLM initiative is bringing Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager, and a new requirements management product (tentatively named “Rational DOORS Requirements Professional”) more closely together. In addition to enhanced integration, there are also improvements to licensing, installation, deployment, and administration across these products.

A key part of this effort has been the shift from “integration across products” to “integrated products through shared services” (see “Building Products from Applications“). This restructuring allows a single set of work-items/defects to be shared by programmers, testers, and requirements engineers from within the context of their own dedicated, role-specific tool – something that no other vendor can offer. And similarly, a single expression of requirements can be shared by testers, programmers and professional requirements engineers all without leaving their own tool.

Looking back to early 2010, and culminating in Beta 2, the progress in the last ten months has been dramatic. We’ve proven the architectural approach in real product development and self hosting, and demonstrated unprecedented product integration, while remaining true to the Jazz architectural principles of loose integration. This architectural approach provides more flexible deployment, greater scalability, simpler administration, seamless integration across products, and enables partners and others to both easily integrate with our applications and also build their own.

To ensure we get the right level of customer validation and feedback, we’re going to continue the CLM beta program, and begin rolling out the CLM improvements using a staged approach, starting with Rational Team Concert to be released very shortly, followed by a CLM Beta and the full CLM GA release in 2011.

In CLM Stage 1 (rest of 2010), we’re going to shift our focus to a GA delivery of the Rational Team Concert part of what you saw in Beta 2. This release of Rational Team Concert will be the first CLM product out of the gate that leverages the new shared service and flexible deployment architecture we have been working on. In addition, we’ll introduce token licensing support (a flexible new way to license Rational products) and provide updates for Rational Requirements Composer 2.0 and Rational Quality Manager 2.0 that include numerous performance and usability improvements.

Between now and mid 2011, we’ll follow with additional CLM Beta releases of the three products, with a significant Beta update targeted for early 2011.

In CLM Stage 2 (mid 2011), we’ll deliver the first full CLM GA release that includes all three products, fully integrated on the new architecture.

This staging allows us to begin rolling out the new CLM architecture while continuing our CLM beta program to get more client feedback and validation, and iterate on key CLM scenarios.

We’re very excited about the CLM initiative and the advantages it will bring for our customers, and we hope you will continue to follow along as we move ahead towards Beta 3 of this exciting initiative in late 2010 and early 2011.

Dave Thomson
Director, Rational Jazz ALM and Eclipse