IBM Rational has given grants to universities to help develop the company’s Jazz platform for application lifecycle management, the company said on Monday.

The company also plans to offer the first Jazz product free to academia.

Jazz is focused on geographically dispersed, team-based development. The goal of Jazz is to enable better collaboration and lifecycle management in software development, said John Kellerman, IBM Rational project manager for Jazz and Eclipse.

"At Jazz.net, we're building this technology platform," Kellerman said.

The first Jazz product, IBM Rational Team Concert, which is a collaborative development platform for small and medium-sized teams using agile development processes, is due in mid-2008. It will be available free to academic institutions for use in accredited education courses, programs, or research projects, Kellerman said.

IBM's Jazz Faculty Grants have gone to the University of California, Irvine as well as to the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria. IBM did not disclose the monetary value of the grants.

The University of British Columbia, with its Emergent Teams project, is working on tooling and instantiation of the development environment to capture information about people who are working on various artifacts to provide guidance on efficient team formation, Kellerman said. Emerging from this effort has been the Emergent Expertise Locator, which recommends a team member for a problem of interest.

At the University of Victoria, researchers are working on a project to provide tooling that aligns project dependencies and social interactions between persons working on a project. For example, if one person is building a component and the other is using it, there should be interaction, said Kellerman.

The University of California, Irvine is gauging the use of Jazz in environments where developers have multiple monitors. Researchers will examine the best ways to present this large amount of information for teams to use.

IBM Rational does not know yet if the university projects will result in development of products. The company began awarding the grants in December 2005 and has not announced any other recipients.

Also on the Jazz agenda is a future version of Rational Method Composer that will enable enactment of best practices. Rational Method Composer enables customizing of the Rational Unified Process platform.