From Big Blue's perspective, managing projects that span geographic and organizational boundaries is emerging as one of the top software delivery challenges. Facilitating greater team agility and alignment with evolving business requirements also compounds the challenge. IBM is betting its transparent approach to community development will find a warm welcome among enterprises.

"Open commercial software development is the next major innovation in collaborative engineering," Dr. Danny Sabbah, general manager, IBM Rational Software, said in a statement. "IBM is taking software development to a new level, and through participation in the Jazz.net community, customers can influence the products they depend on for software delivery."

Developing Jazz Standards

Historically, software development has been a closed process limited to development tools that have focused on making individual developers more productive. Today, software development is becoming more complex, with the actual development happening with offshore teams or business partners in different locations.

At Jazz.net, IBM Rational partners, customers, and others can collaborate transparently with Big Blue and each other to provide input on requirements, report bugs, and ultimately contribute to the development of IBM's software-delivery platform. IBM expects that by opening up the development community as a transparent supply chain, Jazz will drive the evolution of standards and common components incorporated in its future software releases.

To jump-start the collaborative development process at Jazz.net, IBM has posted several incubator projects focused on code analysis, requirements management, and other aspects of development. IBM is encouraging the development community to collaborate on these projects.

The Open-Source Vibe

Brad Shimmin, an analyst at Current Analysis, called the approach "interesting" and noted that other companies, such as Iona and Software AG, also are jumping on the notion of applying open-source practices to closed-source communities to foster a collaborative feel. As founder of the open-source development community Eclipse, Big Blue understands the benefits of developer collaboration, and seems to be applying the lessons it learned there to the Jazz portal, he noted.

"Companies like IBM are making tremendous efforts to give free developer tools so they can get the developers behind them," he said. "They realize that having the backing of developers is paramount when they go into a sales cycle with a company, so they are spending a lot of energy in getting these developers what they need -- everything -- almost to the point of sharing source code."

Shimmin pointed to the Mozilla Project, noting the fruit of collaboration between like-minded individuals working toward a common goal. Bugzilla sprung out from that project, he noted, and many companies are using it for bug tracking today. "I foresee the same sort of growth path with anything that comes out of the Jazz portal," Shimmin said.