INDUSTRY

SOMERS, NY – IBM today announced it is donating $40 million of software to a new independent open-source community. The Java-based open source software, code-named Eclipse, will enable developers to use software tools from multiple suppliers together, allowing developers to integrate business processes used to create e-business applications, such as those for Web services. This new open source community already involves more than 150 leading software tool suppliers working together to evolve Eclipse software, which will be available free-of-charge to developers. More than 1,200 individual developers from 63 countries have already participated in the Eclipse open source community process. The community will be managed by a multi-vendor organization and will include participation by industry leaders such as IBM, Merant, QSSL, Rational, Red Hat, TogetherSoft, and others. Later this month, the community will announce details about the organization, including the multi-vendor board of directors. Today, developers typically use tools and middleware from multiple vendors that are not designed to work together, so they are cumbersome and time-consuming to integrate. By using software tools that easily "plug into" Eclipse, developers can create higher-quality applications in less time and inherit technology developed by other vendors. Eclipse provides a single, unified experience of all development processes and integrates all development tasks such as testing, performance tuning and debugging. In addition, Eclipse easily integrates tools from many vendors with e-business infrastructure software, such as IBM's WebSphere*, which will significantly increase developer productivity. "This is IBM's most audacious open source gambit so far," says James Governor, analyst with IT advisory firm Illuminata, Inc. "The company is driving the development of an open platform that provides many of the underlying services software developers need, bringing tight integration to the tools market. This is not just a framework or set of APIs; it's real code designed to do real work." According to Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group, "By opening up the Eclipse source code, IBM is doing for software tools what Apache did for Web application servers and what Linux did for operating systems. The broad integration of tools and middleware marks the beginning of a new era of compelling productivity gains. And while IBM cooperates on standards, we also compete in the marketplace, and we are delivering the first commercially available software tools built on Eclipse's open source technology, providing the industry's richest support of Web services, XML and J2EE." This is the next step in IBM's strategy to help businesses create, use and manage more automated and integrated e-business systems. By adopting open-source technologies into application development, companies can more quickly adapt to rapidly changing Web technologies and business priorities, including Web services. Eclipse also changes the dynamics of application development, since its plug-in integration encourages team-oriented development and supports developers working in diverse roles such as the Internet, intranets, CRM applications, portals, mobile, commerce, and business process management. The announcement also marks the next stage in IBM's Linux strategy. With Eclipse-based tools -- which run on both Linux and Windows -- developers no longer need to create e-business applications in Windows and port them to Linux, since they can work directly on Linux. This will vastly improve the productivity of Linux developers and their ability to build enterprise-ready applications. It also will allow the abundance of software tools for Windows to be more easily supported on Linux, which will accelerate the establishment of Linux as an application development environment. And since Eclipse is open source, Linux developers can participate in the community evolving the software itself, as they do with Linux. For more information visit www.ibm.com