IBM says new software helps companies build ‘smarter’ products

• The challenge for businesses that build smarter products is how to address complexity without slowing development or increasing costs
• Engineers can now step back and view a project in its entirety to better understand the hundreds of thousands of complex interactions

IBM has announced new software that it said would help organizations bring ‘intelligence’ to the products, systems and applications people use every day.
 
From creation to development and delivery, the new software simplifies the entire process, enabling organizations to reduce costs, address compliance and regulatory requirements and ultimately get innovative products to market quickly, the company said in a statement.
 
From cars to surgical robots, everyday products and systems are becoming more sophisticated due in part to an infusion of software, IBM said.
 
As products become more intelligent, the number of interactions between the software, mechanical and electrical components increases and becomes more complicated. The challenge for businesses that build these “smarter products” is how to address this complexity without slowing development or increasing costs.
 
With the new IBM Engineering Lifecycle Manager software, engineers can now step back and view a project in its entirety to better understand the hundreds of thousands of complex interactions.
 
The software provides searching, querying, viewing and impact analysis across multiple engineering disciplines. This more holistic view of the project helps an organization make better design decisions by identifying potential conflicts and variables that could delay the project and cause cost overruns, IBM said.
 
“The formula is simple: To succeed, companies must deliver innovative products faster and at a lower cost than their competitors,” said Kristof Kloeckner (pic), general manager, IBM Rational Software.
 
“The new offerings from IBM help organizations move beyond the siloed development process of the past 10 years, integrate the engineering disciplines and see the big picture to ultimately develop, test and deliver a better solution,” he added.
 
Everywhere people turn today, the addition of software into products and systems is enabling exciting new capabilities.  Keeping up with these advances can be challenging for the developers.
 
For example, a new car can have 5 to 15 million lines of software code that are reliant on and integrate with thousands of mechanical and electrical components.  If there is a change to the software that controls the automatic braking system of the car, the product development team needs to assess the impact of that change to other software code and systems, IBM said.
 
Without the new IBM software, answering questions such as will the braking system still work or will this cause the project to go over budget, could take months of compiling data by hand from external sources. With the new IBM software, engineers could run a query and quickly identify and analyze the dependencies between the potentially thousands of systems and software design artifacts, the company claimed.
 
Failure to understand these dependencies and relationships can be costly.  Systems engineering mistakes are estimated to cost companies more than US$22 billion in the United States alone.
 
When you consider the increasing compliance requirements faced by many industries the risk increases. One compliance failure generates an estimated US$81 million in extra costs for firms earning more than US$1 billion in revenues.