Irrational? [Laughter] My experience has been that when we talk to customers that have chosen us, they say we are head and shoulders above what Rational is trying to do. Rational is trying to say, "How can we either use Global Services or drive our middleware?" That's where their focus is. Their focus isn't about what's the core development process and how to address that issue. We believe we're uniquely positioned and solve our customers' problems.

Jackson: You have to look at Rational pre-IBM and Rational since the acquisition. Rational pre-IBM I think had a lot of strong vision about what needed to be done. And then post-IBM the focus got changed toward WebSphere and their middleware stack and away from some of the key things they were trying to tackle.

So in a lot of areas we've had a lot of overlap in our product portfolio around ALM with Rational, but where we're now trying to drive those and take those is much more focused than what Rational is doing with their products. We've had a pretty good streak of hiring Rational people. … We're bringing back the innovation mojo into this company. It's there, it's just been latent and we haven't allowed it to surface.

What can you do that is so much different than IBM or Microsoft?

Jackson: Well, we're not thinking about things in terms of tools or integrated tools anymore. The biggest challenge I have across R&D is it's not about taking my tool and integrating [it] with another tool. It's about understanding what is the best practice for this process as it spans an entire organization. And then how would you best implement that process if you could have the technology you wanted.

And what we're finding is, that because of the way this market developed from a product point of view …, certain tasks are automated through the products. But anybody who has a task that spans a product, or anybody who needs to know what's going on in the bigger picture; it's that management layer that is completely focused on manual methods.

So we have to think about not just the implementation of the practitioner tool and how information is integrated from other tools, but how do you create a management layer above that?

And in Segue we're not just buying a company that has testing assets. The thing that we're impressed with in Segue is they're building a testing management layer and they're tying that back to other parts of the life-cycle process.

What type of relationship do you expect to have with IDE providers?

We expect to have positive relationships with IDE vendors. For instance, Microsoft we have a good relationship with because we integrate with Visual Studio and do things to help .Net. We'll make sure we reach out to them and to everybody else.

Next Page: Drawing inspiration from Apple.