During the IBM Rational Software Development Conference here last week, IBM released its first set of tools that link the Rational development tool set with IBM's Tivoli systems management technology suite.

And in a somewhat historic moment, Mike Devlin, Rational co-founder and outgoing general manager of the Rational Software division of IBM's Software Group, passed the baton to Danny Sabbah, the newly announced Rational general manager.

"It's appropriate that my last week with Rational is here at the Rational conference," Devlin said.

Meanwhile, Sabbah said Rational's task is to "evolve patterns of success in software engineering."

To that end, IBM announced new software—IBM Problem Resolution Toolkit for Rational Application Developer and IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit for Rational Performance Tester—to help automatically identify and repair business application problems, enabling development teams and IT operations staff to share application performance information. The software measures application performance in production, identifies problems as they occur and sends a problem report to the developer.

Lee Nackman, IBM vice president of product development and customer support, said the technology is especially useful for companies implementing SOAs (service-oriented architectures).

In fact, Sabbah said that although IBM is not announcing an SOA SDK (software development kit), the company basically has such a thing in use by its IBM Global Services.

Joshua Barnes, a software architect with Ajilon Consulting, in Towson, Md., who has been using Rational's RUP (Rational Unified Process) and Rational's tool set on assignment at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida Inc., said he believes the new problem-resolution and performance-optimization tools have the potential to enhance the quality of applications and save time and money for user organizations. "It'll speed up the ability to address problems and performance issues," Barnes said.

IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., also announced service offerings, including the IBM Standard Deployment Service for Rational Portfolio Manager, IBM Fast Track Deployment Service for Rational Portfolio Manager and IBM Rational Project/ Program Management Assessment Service. Another new service, IBM Software Release and Deployment Service, facilitates the use of IBM Rational ClearCase and IBM Rational ClearQuest with Tivoli Configuration Manager.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.