Big Blue this week announced new tools and a commitment to better align business, operational and development goals of enterprise software applications in a bid to reduce failed projects.

Executives at the IBM Rational Softtware Development Conference in Las Vegas told delegates fusing the needs of business and software development is vital for successful application development.

At the keynote, titled “Better Software. Better Business”, Daniel Sabbah, general manager of IBM Rational stressed the importance of business factors such as ROI and bringing tools that translate the business world with software development and vice versa to prevent what he called “finger-pointing”.

“Vision without implementation is hallucination”, Sabbah told roughly 2000 delegates.
The company unveiled software that leverages Tivolli technology into the IBM Rational offerings that can measure real-time performance of an application at a high-level visually, identify possible defects when they happen and allow the developer to find the location of the defect in the code and fix it “within minutes or hours rather than days or weeks”, according to Sabbah.

The two new products — IBM Problem Resolution Toolkit for Rational Application Developer and IBM Performance Optimisation ToolKIT for Rational Performance Tester — will, according to IBM, allow development teams and operational personnel to have a common view and will particularly beneficial to companies building service orientated architecture (SOA).

IBM’s approach to team development and application lifecycle management is also being pursued in a similar effort by Microsoft and Borland. Microsoft plan to release the delayed Visual Studio Team System this year, and Borland will offer the Borland Core Software Delivery Platform.