Actually I am trying to do the same. I would be very interested to see outside of IBM userbase number.

I can't provide specific installed base numbers for Rational Team Concert but I can say that the product is one of the most successful products IBM has launched, measured in terms of sales in the first 9 months of availability. We have RTC customers of all sizes from 5 users to 5,000+ and success in all industries. If you are working with a local sales contact they can provide you with a customer reference appropriate for your specific usage.

It is also true that adoption within IBM has been viral with over 19,000 developers inside IBM expected to be using RTC by the end of this year. Nobody in IBM is mandating use of RTC/Jazz so this rate of adoption says a lot about the value of the product for distributed development teams. (Most IBMers work from home offices and development teams are highly distributed).

All,

Looking for some help here. I am trying to convince others within my organization that we need to look at moving to Jazz/RTC. The folks I deal with just say "it's too new," "it's unproven," and "no one is using it outside of IBM."

I'd love to have counters to these points, but I just don't have enough data. Obviously these folks are risk-averse, which I can understand. Can anyone in the community provide me any rebuttals to these statements?

Thanks in advance,
Mike Johnson

Hi Mike

Usually, getting people to actually try out RTC helps a lot with these discussions, but just in case, here is some of the info I offer to people interested in RTC.

"it's too new" - well, the Jazz dev team and others have been self-hosting on the software for some time now. As I recall, they went completely self-hosting in over 2.5 years ago, and where using components like SCM before that. We are rapidly approaching the end of the first year of commercial availability, with a formal beta programme that started towards the end of 2007, so the software itself has been heavily used over the last 2-3 years. Having the developers use the software to develop the software definitely helps flush out defects and problems get fixed very quickly.

"unproven" - we are seeing RTC being used in a variety of situations, size of teams, platforms, etc - including jazz.net. This site alone is a great example of a large contributor community. I personally find RTC great fun to work with - probably the most reliable and fun piece of development software I have ever had the pleasure of working with.

"no one is using this outside IBM" - again, if you look at the people on this forum, you will see a variety of companies using RTC. Rolf mentioned some of the team sizes. I am personally working with banks who are deploying RTC in end-user populations from 15 to a few hundred, with one customer looking at extending this to several thousand users on as the RTC Enterprise version starts shipping. This is just the community I am working with directly, and there are a large number of people doing my customer-facing technical role at IBM who have similar or bigger customer bases. I have also helped out at various other types of companies like System Integrators (big names you would definitely recognise) and other commercial companies in other areas who have similar or even bigger deployments or plans for bigger deployments.

As Rolf points out - get in touch with your local IBM folks and they can provide more information that is perhaps more specific to your situation.

I urge you to try and persuade your colleagues to actually use the software too - that is the best proof point.

Good luck - and let us all know how you get on.

anthony