The Rational product family provides a seamless integration of ALM capabilities referred to as the IBM Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM). CLM provides a collaborative way for software delivery teams to unify multiple platforms and coordinate roles and activities across the core ALM disciplines of Change Management, Requirements Management, and Quality Management.

The core CLM solution integrates a corresponding set of products -- Rational Team Concert , Rational Requirements Composer, and Rational Quality Manager -- to create a seamless and highly collaborative solution for software delivery. This solution can also be integrated with Rational Software Architect to extend the value of CLM to design management. IBM also maintains integrations between a number of its other ALM products, such as Rational ClearQuest .

The experience gained from driving integration across these products helps to identify the challenges in applying traditional integration technologies. It spurred IBM to look toward more strategic solutions, including involvement in the Open Services for LifecycleCollaboration (OSLC) and W3C Linked Data Platform. OSLC provides a set of interfaces organized into a number of functional areas (domains) that allow lifecycle tools that stem from many sources to link and trace data being managed by those tools. OSLC is now the Rational standard for integration implementation.

The Rational product family is expanding its implementation of OSLC integrations beyond the Rational products. Many of our customers operate in a highly diverse and heterogeneous lifecycle environment. There are a variety of reasons why tools already established in their environments are critical to their business. These tools often cannot simply be removed and replaced with new ones. Therefore, IBM takes its experience with integrations across Rational products and applies it to select third-party tools as well.

By listening to customers, IBM assessed which tools are most needed for integrating with Rational products. IBM created a new Integrations Directory on jazz.net (jazz.net/extend) that lists all of the integrations currently available with Rational tools. This directory also includes a facility for requesting integrations that do not yet exist. It encourages customers to share their integration needs to continuously help IBM identify the highest priority tools for its Rational customers.

As strong drivers in the OSLC community, IBM champions an open approach to linked data specifications that can be adopted by vendor, business partner, and community members directly. The results of this approach can now be seen in a new offering called the Rational Lifecycle Integration Adapters. These adapters allow customers to continue using their existing lifecycle tools and still gain benefit from many capabilities found in the Rational ALM products. The first release of this offering includes adapters for integrating with HP ALM, Atlassian JIRA, and open source Git.

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