Blog by Marie Wieck, GM, IBM Cloud Integration and Darren Oberst, EVP & Global Head of HCL Technologies – Products Business Unit

Building on a history of collaboration between the two companies, HCL and IBM have entered into a 15-year partnership that takes the best of their shared knowledge and teaming experience to build industry-leading Experience enhanced, Automation and DevOps solutions.

Automation and DevOps software are crucial to the success of their digital enterprises. Most recognize these tools enable them to better react to today’s dynamic environment of new cloud platform and cognitive solutions. With automation, organizations can efficiently manage their workloads through planning, processing and analyzing of information technology events. DevOps is now an essential part of the software development process as it improves the speed, quality and predictability of development projects. Experience enhancement is the ability to modernize existing business processes to provider a richer and improved ergonomic workflow for organizations and their customers.

HCL and IBM recognize these needs and have committed to investing in and growing this portfolio of experience, automation, DevOps products, platforms and UI modernization/API/web service enablement for mainframes. We want our clients to succeed and are committed to empowering them to respond to this rapid pace of innovation.

So what does this partnership look like? Collaboration is key. HCL and IBM will work together on future product roadmaps for Tivoli Workload Scheduler, Rational Testing, Rational Change & Configuration Management (ClearCase and ClearQuest), and Rational Modeling & Construction (Rational Rose, Rational Software Architect and Rational Application Developer) software for on–premises, hybrid and public cloud and software as a service (SaaS) platforms.  The same kind of focus will be applied to the roadmaps for the offering of Host Access Client Package (HACP) and the UI modernization & web service enablement offering of Host Access Transformation Solution (HATS).

Clients who are using these products will continue to engage with IBM as the primary partner. HCL has licensed IBM technology and will build additional features and functionalities based on business realities and client priorities. Both companies will work to grow the market for these products.

This partnership will enable us to focus our technical teams on native cloud and cognitive solutions, as well as industry-specific opportunities. Development and support teams from IBM, who are expert in these products and offerings, will benefit from HCL’s strong engineering heritage and culture of empowerment. Together, we will continue to advance and cloud-enable existing software, which is essential to the long-term success of our clients.

Both companies have enjoyed a longstanding and successful partnership across technology, software, services, and most recently, IBM Bluemix cloud platform services. With a history of collaboration and innovation, we’re excited about the opportunity to jointly address our clients' need for transformational leadership. There is no doubt that HCL + IBM is a powerful combination - and a big win for our clients.