IBM's Booch cites big future for parallel apps development

IBM Fellow and UML co-creator also talks about blogs, LAMP, and Microsoft

Booch: Tivoli products in particular are directed toward multiplatform things, and with regards to WebSphere, one of the realities of us being part of the larger IBM is our modeling tools and such have been able to take advantage of that close association to allow us to do more direct WebSphere kinds of things. The reality of the marketplace is it is a heterogeneous marketplace.

InfoWorld: Tell me about your keynote presentation for tomorrow.

Booch: The fundamental focus of my keynote is about innovation. My focus inside Rational, and now IBM, has always been as the designated free radical, so I worry about not this quarter or the next quarter or the current release, but I worry about the next three to five years.  And to that end, I help direct where I can [the] things that will enable us to keep the pipeline in innovation full. In the keynote we'll talk about ways we do that. One is through adaptation, and in particular I'm going to talk about how we've been adapting things like the Rational Unified Process, to both expand beyond where it has been as well as to drive it inside IBM. I'll [also] be talking about the several billion dollars of research monies that Rational spends with IBM Research and some of the particular projects we're funding, such as a thing called Activity Spaces. Our belief is we can do some cool things in terms of IDEs. This is what we're doing with Eclipse and the like, but as organizations move toward geographically and temporally dispersed development, there's need for tooling to support collaboration among those teams, and so we have directed research in that space.

InfoWorld: What is your perspective on Microsoft Whidbey and the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Perl/Python) stack and where they stand as far as software development for enterprises?

Booch: Let me take those two issues separately and talk about the Microsoft side for once. I certainly respect where Microsoft is headed here. [But] they don't have a lot of customer examples where you can say that Microsoft dominates the enterprise from top to bottom. And indeed, if you look at Microsoft's moves, they're increasingly more and more proprietary. The work they're doing in their Software Factories, for example, does not embrace the open standards of things like the UML, and so it's another example of Microsoft saying, "We're going to do it our way." Which is fine -- that’s their business strategy and that's great. But as we spoke about earlier, the fact of having a heterogeneous environment means that IBM's strategy has been and will continue to be support for open standards so you can have this kind of mix and match.

InfoWorld: Borland is providing Microsoft's UML support.

Booch: Yes, they are. And that’s an interesting thing going on there. If you look at just the marketplace for tooling, because I thought for the longest time Borland was going to be an independent kind of [vendor]. But clearly they're making closer connections to Microsoft.

InfoWorld: Why do you think they are doing that?

Booch: I can't speak for Borland, but just looking at it as an outsider, there are clear economic pressures on Borland to move in this direction. Eclipse fundamentally changed the business market for these guys, because now, how do you make money off of an IDE?  And the answer is, well, it's a commodity and so you don't. And that changed their business equation greatly.

InfoWorld: What do you think of LAMP?