In an interview Wednesday, Daniel Sabbah, general manager of Rational, said the company is re-architecting core elements of its product set to leverage the Internet and Web 2.0 concepts such as AJAX-based (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web interfaces. The goal is to accommodate community-based software development, he said.

New products bearing these changes will start to appear toward the end of the first half of this year, Sabbah said. IBM seeks to make software engineering more flexible and more reactive with its plan, accommodating agile processes.

"The aspect of it that's much more interesting is really building software engineering communities," Sabbah said.

Noting the trend toward collaboration between U.S. and offshore developers, IBM seeks to provide a platform accommodating a global, distributed model. These developers will able to work on aspects of development, such as requirements modeling, architecture, changing legacy code, documentation, and bug fixes.

According to Sabbah, the company seeks to optimize SOA development with its plan. SOA is largely about decomposing large parts of monolithic software into more flexible components, he said