9.1. Introduction

IBM is a global computer products and services company with annual revenue of almost $100 billion. One of six brands in IBM’s Software Group, Rational focuses on system and software delivery for IBM’s clients. With its origins in software configuration management and software modeling tools, Rational was acquired by IBM in 2003 and has expanded its areas of concern to provide tools and technologies that support all aspects of the software delivery life cycle, including project planning, requirements management, code delivery and management, testing, security analysis, and application delivery.

The Rational software delivery organization consists of over two thousand practitioners¹ in a variety of locations around the world, responsible for a portfolio of more than a hundred products. The wide distribution of these practitioners, illustrated in Figure 9.1, is a consequence of a global strategy to engage resources wherever the skills are available (with certain specialties in short supply), decisions to use offshore locations to reduce cost (including recent trends to increase its labs in China and India), and the organization’s history (including a variety of acquisitions and restructuring events).