kip has been in his present position with IBM for eight years and prior to that taught at the University of N.C. at Chapel Hill. He was also a customer of IBM's and previously ran a data processing center.

Paul: Can you describe your primary role as it stands now.

Skip: I've got three areas. On one side I help determine what the contents of products should be. The second is I help to determine what the channel strategy should be. And third, I work on what the whole product should be like - the education, consulting, training - to bring solutions to the marketplace.

Paul: What is IBM trying to achieve with the VisualAge family of products? How is this significant compared to competitive products in the industry?

Skip: What we're trying to achieve is to bring a robust set of products to the market to help people solve their business problems, to make them more competitive, and to engage technology as part of those solutions to help people solve complex client-server environmental problems. Think of VisualAge as a suite of tools from analysis and design to programming model tools to team connection manage tools to help people manage and build and design applications and a suite of power tools around that that do transaction processing, access to legacy code, data access, data manipulation, things like that.

Paul: The whole gamut.

Skip: Exactly.

Paul: What marketing themes do you have for VA in '97 and what specifically do they relate to in the products?

Skip: The primary marketing theme is we're helping people build complex applications. We offer the language of choice, so you can pick Smalltalk or Java or C++; we offer a platform of choice, so you can run OS/2 or you can run Windows, in '97 you'll be able to run on MVS; we offer scalability - everything from the local workstation to a midrange server to an MVS server; and we offer strong reliability across all these different platforms.

Paul: Can you give us a preview of the different events in the products? Any new features?

Skip: Well, the exciting thing here is that the technology is so robust that we're able to develop features very quickly because we're reusing a lot of the technology from one product in another product. So, this is enabling us to roll out VA Java in the very near term. We're also expanding onto the Internet. The Internet is an exploding area and we're being able to expand VA into the Internet and we're expanding the VA product set into industry applications. And so we're focusing on the finance industry and insurance industry, providing industry content to be associated with specific industry modeling tools, specific application development environments tailored to specific industries.

Paul: As follow-up, when is VA for Java expected to be released?

Skip: The whole world of Java is expanding tremendously. We've got large development activities going on in every continent. It's in beta right now. But this is a different IBM than you and I know Paul. What we do is ship the product when the customer tells us it's ready. So, we're going to ensure it's got the right quality; we're going to ensure it's got the right functions; and then we're going to put it into a large beta program, with 20, 30, 40 thousand customers on it. And then we're going to put it into the marketplace. It's a significantly different type of product, because we're targeted for enterprise customers. Database access is important to us, transaction processing is important to us, leveraging the designs of the billions of dollars worth of legacy code and designs up on servers as well as on workstations is all important to us. That's why we're bringing out a robust set of VA products including Java.

Paul: How does the VA directions relate to the directions of IBM as a whole?

Skip: The entire IBM corporation has adopted the VA family as the tools of choice. So you'll see a lot of activities. The Internet division, as far as Internet publications, they're talking about Java and VA Java as a tool provider.

Paul: Can you expound upon how VA is moving to a more common base?

Skip: What we're really saying is that customers don't care what the base is. What they want is interoperability across the languages, so that what they write in one language can inter-operate with other languages. So, what you really want to have is the stuff that you write in Smalltalk to be able to inter-operate with the stuff that's in Java. That the investment you make in skills and training and code in Smalltalk can be applied to the investment in Java. That's what we're doing. We're absolutely committed to that. That level of inter-operability is working today in the research laboratories, and we're going to be bringing it to market.

Paul: What changes do you see in the OO industry that are affecting the VA products?

Skip: I think the OO industry has matured from using the technology adoption life cycle where OO has been an innovative area. We're quickly moving into an area of early adopters, in some cases early majority. For those people that aren't knowledgeable of that, what we're really doing is moving it from a technology base and bringing it into the mainstream. So people are gaining a competitive advantage from OO in general and this is having a tremendous impact on IBM and the whole VA family. So they are seeing a competitive advantage from using VA Smalltalk. They're receiving benefits in terms of actual savings, and they're coming to market faster. And so as this OO expands into mainline IT, the VA family as well as a lot of other products, are benefiting from it.

Paul: IBM as a corporation has focused on "the network as the computer" - how does VA relate to this focus?

Skip: One of the real assets that we have is a broad set of laboratories - everything from operating systems to communications to hardware to tools to software to applications. One of the things that Gershner's done really well is help set the direction of the IBM Corporation to focus on network-centric computing. So, every division is working under that vision and we're all collaborating. So, all the tools are being optimized for network-centric computing.

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