IBMs Rational brand has its annual users conference – IBM Innovate – next week, in Orlando, FL. I am really looking forward to it. Having worked for Rational for over a decade, it is my ‘home conference’ and my favorite (Yes, I am biased. What can I say?). All developers, development managers, executives and consultants should be interested and paying close attention to this conference. In fact, the interest should not be just limited to development, but all practitioners who are involved with application delivery and operations (dev-ops) and of course, the associated managers and executives who are responsible for these practitioners.

Over the years, IBM Rational has compiled a formidable array of tools, processes, best practices and assets that have really made it the only vendor with coverage of the whole spectrum of application delivery, from concept to operations, for almost all the technologies and platforms there are!

• Application Portfolio Management
• Enterprise Architecture
• Application Lifecycle Management
• Model Driven Development
• Analysis and Design
• Agile Development and Delivery
• Complex and Embedded Systems
• Quality Management
• Automated Functional Regression Testing
• Load and Stress Testing
• Virtualized Testing
• Service Testing
• Collaborative Development
• Globally Distributed Development
• Application Delivery Process Automation
• IT Business Intelligence
• Build and Deployment Automation
• Continuous Delivery
• Dev-Ops
• Agile Dev-Ops
• Solution Architecture Modeling
• Code Quality Management
• Process Modeling
• Change and Configuration Management
• Requirements Elicitation and Management
• Mobile Development
• Enterprise Modernization
• Cross-platform Software Development Platform
• Cloud Hosted Development Platform

Just to list a few of the areas where Rational provides tools, best practices, enablement and assets. If your work or that of your company touches any of these, you should, like me, come to Innovate next week. Come see the tools, meet the experts, talk to other customers succeeding with the tools and learn for yourself. And of course Foreigner is playing at Innovate! (For those of you under 30, they are a music group).

Register here or contact your Rational sales team.

I will be live blogging and tweeting from Innovate. So, keep visiting this blog and follow me on Twitter.