As part of the effort, Rational products will add capabilities to manage architectures and software lifecycles for building more flexible software in a globally distributed fashion. Internet-based community project efforts also will be enhanced, according to Sabbah.

"There's plenty examples of people doing organizationally distributed and globally distributed development, and they need better tools to be able to do that, and they need to understand the coherent architecture," Sabbah said.

"[IBM's effort is] certainly related to ALM (application lifecycle management), but it's a different dimension of (ALM) because in this particular case, the application itself has to be dynamically assembled with many of the parts coming from places where you couldn't predict," Sabbah said.

"Every single element of our product portfolio will have a globally distributed element to it" and feature the ability to be hosted under Internet standards, Sabbah stressed.

He raised the notion of offering Rational products via a SaaS (software-as-a-service) model, but did not openly commit to this.