IBM (NYSE: IBM) unveiled new software and research aimed at improving the way employees across an organization collaborate in a globally integrated enterprise. The challenges of globalization are forcing companies to become more nimble, using an increasingly geographically-dispersed and virtual workforce to remain competitive. In the world of software development, this means 24×7 collaboration with specialized teams around the globe to pick up where another left off. IBM is also examining how virtual worlds can help software development teams break down the barriers caused by globalization. IBM is announcing it is opening up its development platform based on Web 2.0 technologies for developers to collaborate and contribute to software under development at jazz.net. Jazz.net is an open, commercial community designed to help companies globally and transparently collaborate on the development of Jazz-based technology. Previously only available to IBM customers, academics and partners, Jazz.net is now open to the greater software development community. IBM also announced IBM Rational Team Concert Express, available later this year, which will help small and mid-sized development teams enable real-time collaboration across a geographically dispersed software delivery team. IBM will also offer IBM Rational Team Concert Express free of charge to qualified open source projects and to academic institutions for use in accredited course programs or academic research projects. IBM Rational Team Concert Express beta 2 includes Web dashboards to help software project teams see real-time project status data such as the status of work items and project health. IBM Rational Team Concert Express beta 2 allows software development teams to use DB2 and other databases to host the IBM Rational Team Concert repository. IBM Rational Team Concert Express is based on middleware including IBM WebSphere, IBM Lotus Sametime, Apache Tomcat, Apache Derby and Jabber. To register for the Jazz project or download IBM Rational Team Concert, beta 2, visit http://www.ibm.com/