Not long ago, upholstery was about the only "software" designed into most automobiles. Today, it's not unusual for cars to rely on scores of embedded microprocessors and hundreds of millions of lines of software code for everything from keeping the engine running to telling the driver how much gas is left in the tank.
And it's not just cars that have become increasingly reliant on software. Consumer products, aircraft, medical devices, and many other types of manufactured products depend on software.
Unfortunately for manufacturers who use product lifecycle management (PLM) tools to coordinate the development and performance of their products, those tools haven't kept up with the rising tide of software in most products. While most PLM tools do a good job of integrating information drawn from mechanical engineering and electrical engineering domains, they typically don't address the software engineering domain.
A new partnership between PLM tools provider Agile Software Corp. and IBM's Rational software development tools business unit is aimed at closing that gap. Agile and IBM Rational recently said they will integrate Rational's ClearCase and ClearQuest software development tools with the Agile 9 and e6 PLM tools. Manufacturers using the Agile PLM platforms to manage the product development and enhancement processes will be able, for the first time, to track information about software development processes along with mechanical and electrical engineering-oriented processes, says Ray Hein, vice president of product strategy at Agile.
"Once the Rational offerings are tied into Agile, manufacturers will be able to do things like track defects and do integrated change management across engineering disciplines, including software development," Hein says. A cell phone manufacturer whose products were experiencing display problems, for example, would be able to more quickly identify the problem as a hardware or software issue and fix it, since all product lifecycle information related to the phone would be stored in the same system, Hein says.
Both companies will participate in the design of the integrated PLM product, but Agile will contribute the bulk of the development resources, Hein says. The two companies will jointly market and sell the solution, targeting markets such as automotive, high technology, consumer products, medical devices, and others that increasingly make use of software.
Agile chose to partner with IBM Rational because it is a leader in software development tools, Hein says. Also, he notes, the partnership builds on existing relationships between IBM and Agile. Some of Agile's products are built on top of IBM's WebSphere portal middleware, and IBM's services organizations are involved in implementing Agile products, Hein says.
The joint Agile/IBM Rational product, so far unnamed, is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2007, according to Hein.
This article originally appeared in the November 2006 issue of Managing Automation.