WebSphere Revolution

“At the second Apache conference, there was a guy that had shaved into the hair on the back of his head the message ‘WebSphere is cool.’ ” —Tom Inman, IBM Vice President of Marketing for Information and Platform Solutions all three efforts should be folded into one under the WebSphere brand. It was a bold decision that reflected a spirit of moving function forward rather than clinging to the past. It was exactly the right thing to do. From there, the vision caught fire within IBM and the unified team began the culturally and technically daunting task of combining the capabilities of Component Broker, CICS TXSeries, WebSphere Application Server, network dispatchers, servlet engines, connectors, and other individual pieces of technology. As Robert LeBlanc recalls, “We had people in Hursley, Rochester, Toronto, Austin, and other labs around the world working on it and it wasn’t even an official project people just had the passion because we saw this next generation of computing that could be a game changer.” Experience IBM gained supporting the 1998 Nagano Olympic Games and the 1998 Masters golf tournament helped guide the team’s effort. Things were moving fast. Helene Armitage, then Director of Software Development for WebSphere, held daily teleconferences to bring the disparate development groups together. And her 20 key software architects flew site-to-site every month to unify their efforts and keep the developers focused on what they needed to build. These site visits, combined with the importance and excitement of the project, resulted in a close knit development team despite physical distance. Project management disciplines were of paramount importance to keep the project charging ahead with efficiency. As Helene recalls, “We started with about 70 core people and that number would grow to 700 during the course of the first few releases. It was one of the most fun programming environments people were opinionated, creative, and doing break-through things with our distributed software development process before distributed development and open source were popular.” Helene’s team also built a Website to download the WebSphere Application Server product—this was IBM’s first open beta program. It was the first time a customer could sign a software agreement over the Web, download the code, and participate in a beta program without being nominated by an IBM team. While this is standard IBM practice today, it was revolutionary at the time. The IBM team tracked the product downloads and actively called customers to learn what they were using the code for and to track customer 1998 Winter Olympic Games open in Nagano, Japan. 1998 WebSphere Application Server becomes the first IBM product offered as an open beta. 20

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of WebSphere Revolution

WebSphere Revolution Table of Contents The Rise of Internet Business WebSphere Takes the Stage WebSphere Application Server Evolves Beyond the Application Server WebSphere and On Demand Business New Flexibility through SOA An Eye Toward the Future

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