Please subscribe if you agree to this letter which was formulated at the German Synergy User Group Meeting in May 2014 (it greatly impresses your subscription if you provide your company's name e.g. in a comment or in addition to your last name):

 

Dr. Kloeckner,

We are writing to you as an independent user group of Rational Synergy and Rational Change, in order to bring to your attention our concerns about the future of these two products.

Synergy currently offers unique and powerful software configuration management functions that are required in our daily project business. The IBM Portfolio does not currently offer with RTC an adequate alternative.

The product and information policy over the last few years makes us fear that IBM Rational does not perceive or recognize the impact of this policy on us as long-term customers and users of the Synergy Product Suite.

The user community welcomes the efforts that are currently being undertaken by IBM to consolidate its SCM and CM products in favor of a modern, contemporary and flexible architecture, however, they view critically the current application that is being developed.

The fact that the last Synergy Release was not issued as a new release but as a Mod Pack so that the product support will not be extended beyond 2016 only reinforces our fears:

We fear that the active sales and distribution of Synergy and Change will be halted.

We are concerned that the development and support of Synergy and Change will be halted before a comparable alternative and a suitable migration path are available.

We are concerned that RTC will be greatly enlarged, so much so that its strengths are going to be lost.

We are concerned that with the migration from Synergy to another configuration management tool much needed functionality will be permanently lost.

We are concerned that the changeover from Synergy and Change to another IBM tool will result in higher costs and thus will not offer any advantage over the adoption of a competing product.

We are concerned that future SCM tools from IBM will not differentiate themselves from open source products.

We are concerned that the confidence in IBM as a valuable and worthy partner will be lost.

We hope that Synergy and Change will be actively developed and marketed over a long period of time, far beyond 2016.

 
For the safeguarding of the undertaken investments:

We expect IBM to provide future-proof architectures for Rational Synergy and Rational Change (e.g. with IPv6 and 64-bit support).

We expect that in the future new features and enhancements as well as regular updates and fixes for Rational Synergy and Rational Change will be provided.

We expect that we will continue to be provided with the existing Rational Synergy SCM functions from IBM; e.g. through suitable other tools (not currently fulfilled by RTC-SCM) or by a stronger coupling of Rational Synergy and RTC-SCM.

We expect a more open and regular communication regarding roadmaps, release planning, releases etc. beyond the two year horizon.

We expect to be able to use our adapted Rational Change CM processes, which have been developed with considerable effort and cost, in the future.

We expect that in the future we can continue to use the Rational Synergy managed data and the configuration structures as well as the established processes.

We expect that Rational Synergy and Rational Change will not be discontinued without the provision of migration strategies and only by the retention of the Synergy- functionality and data.

After the evaluation of the current RTC-SCM version it is clear to us that a change from Synergy and Change to RTC is neither possible nor foreseeable.

We would be available for a meeting in order to concretize our concerns.

On behalf of the companies that participated in the 12th user group meeting.