IBM yesterday made its development and test tools available in the cloud with a new offering called Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud.
IBM’s cloud services contain 15 different Rational products, including Rational Team Concert for collaborative development and test, Rational Quality Manager for test planning and lab management, and Rational Requirements Composer.
Rational Build Forge and Rational Asset Manager were added to assist in managing the development of cloud services, according to IBM.
Pricing varies from client to client based on requirements and licensing arrangements, said David Locke, director of worldwide marketing at IBM. Customers may use existing IBM licenses in the cloud.
Collectively, the products are known as IBM Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing, and are also available as deliverables for private clouds managed by IBM. The private cloud offering shipped in November.
Customers may also manage and host their own private clouds with IBM CloudBurst, an offering of pre-integrated sets of hardware and software for deploying private clouds.
The value of using IBM’s hosted services is the ability to provision a common infrastructure for “instant on” development and test across multiple projects, said Locke. “You may think that Rational is the key player here, but if you think about development/test, it goes beyond just a set of Rational tools; you think about the complexity of doing testing.”
Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud makes it easier to get different configurations up and running, Locke claimed. Test management services ensure that the tests are run against the correct platforms and configurations, he added.
Those capabilities reduce the provisioning cycle from weeks to minutes while reducing the time required for test and quality assurance, IBM claims.
IBM is simultaneously launching a Web developers’ community with resources for cloud computing.
