Alliance Between Microsoft and Rational Expands Market For Visual Modeling Tools

Alliance Between Microsoft and Rational Expands Market For Visual Modeling Tools

REDMOND, Wash., and CUPERTINO, Calif., Feb. 3, 1998 — Fueled by strong demand from enterprise developers for Microsoft® Visual Modeler, a visual modeling tool jointly developed by Rational Software Corp. and Microsoft Corp., the companies today announced that Microsoft Visual Modeler has been slipstreamed into the Enterprise Edition of both the Microsoft Visual Basic® development system version 5.0 and Microsoft Visual Studio
™
97 development system. To date, over 11,000 customers of Visual Studio and Microsoft Visual Basic Enterprise Edition have downloaded Visual Modeler from the Microsoft Web site, making it one of the most popular enterprise features on the Visual Studio site. This overwhelming response on the Web has prompted Microsoft to ship Visual Modeler in the box with Visual Studio and Visual Basic so it can reach everyone who licenses the software.

“The large number of customers of Visual Studio and Visual Basic who have already downloaded Visual Modeler is a testament to the excitement about visual modeling among enterprise application developers,” said Jon Roskill, director of Visual Tools marketing at Microsoft. “Our relationship with Rational is based on the increasing acceptance of visual modeling among developers using Visual Studio and Visual Basic, and the pace of this market acceptance is exceeding our expectations.”

Microsoft Visual Modeler is the result of a multiyear development and marketing collaboration between Microsoft and Rational. As part of this effort, Rational recently opened a development laboratory in Microsoft’s hometown of Redmond to focus on integrating Rational’s products with the Visual Studio suite of enterprise development tools.

“Consistent with the strong customer acceptance of Visual Modeler, we’ve seen substantial increases in demand for Rational Rose among developers using Visual Studio and Visual Basic,” said Rob Dickerson, senior vice president of products for Rational. “Our relationship with Microsoft has not only helped increase product sales for Rational, but also provided us with the access to Microsoft technologies we need to best meet the demands of Microsoft developers.”

“Rational’s strategy for compiling a comprehensive solution that spans the software development life cycle is exactly on target with where the market is going,” said Paul Gross, vice president of developer tools at Microsoft. “As enterprise application developers move to component-based development, they require tightly coupled tools and environments. This is one reason we are working closely with Rational to ensure complete integration and interoperability between Rational’s tools and Visual Studio.”

Visual Modeler is a subset of Rational Rose, sharing a common code base and offering a scalable, integrated, fully compatible set of visual modeling solutions for the programmer using Visual Studio and Visual Basic. Visual Modeler supports a subset of the unified modeling language (UML) designed to make first-time modelers successful with little or no training in visual modeling. Developed at Rational, supported by Microsoft and officially adopted as a standard by the Object Management Group (OMG), the UML defines a graphical language for describing the architecture and components of a software system. Detailed specifications of the UML are available at (http://www.rational.com/uml/) .

Visual Modeler can be seamlessly upgraded to Rational Rose, which extends Visual Modeler with additional UML capabilities such as business requirements modeling, scenario analysis, and support for C++ and Java. Rational Rose for Visual Basic helps automate the component-based development of enterprise applications and, like Visual Modeler, enables full round-trip engineering of Visual Basic 5.0 and is integrated with the Microsoft Repository. More details on the features of Rational Rose and Visual Modeler are available at http://www.microsoft.com/vstudio/ or (http://www.rational.com/rose/) .

Microsoft Visual Modeler is available as a component of Microsoft Visual Studio 97. Rational Rose is available from Rational.

Microsoft Visual Studio 97 is a complete development tools suite for enterprise development. Visual Studio 97 provides corporations with easy-to-use tools for building business applications for the Windows NT® Server operating system, including client/server, multitier and Web-based solutions. Visual Studio 97 Professional Edition features Visual Basic 5.0, the Visual C® ++ development system version 5.0, the Visual InterDev
™Web development system 1.0 and the Visual FoxPro® database development system 5.0. Visual Studio 97 Enterprise Edition also includes enterprise and team development features such as the Microsoft Repository, Visual Modeler, Visual SourceSafe
™
version control system 5.0, Visual Database Tools, Visual Component Manager, and a development version of Microsoft SQL Server
™
6.5. For more information on Visual Studio 97, visit http://www.microsoft.com/vstudio/ .

About Rational

Rational Software Corp. (Nasdaq “RATL”) develops, markets and supports a comprehensive solution that automates the component-based development of software. Rational’s solution includes an integrated family of products that automate development and quality assurance throughout the software life cycle, a software process that can be configured to the specific needs of customers, and a range of consulting and support services. For more information on Rational’s products and services, visit Rational’s Web site at (http://www.rational.com/) .

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers. The company offers a wide range of products and services for business and personal use, each designed with the mission of making it easier and more enjoyable for people to take advantage of the full power of personal computing every day.

Microsoft, Visual Basic, Visual Studio, Windows NT, Visual C++, Visual InterDev, Visual FoxPro and Visual SourceSafe are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.

The word “Rational” and Rational’s products are trademarks of Rational Software Corp.

Other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Note to editors: If you are interested in viewing additional information on Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft Web page at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ on Microsoft’s corporate information pages.

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