How IBM will support cloud developers

The announcement of wide ranging user support for cloud services made by IBM earlier this week will be of especial interest to the developer community. The company has identified them as a specific target that can benefit from greater support and guidance on the technology, hopefully leading, of course, to a greater cloud market share for IBM itself.

The company has introduced a package of more than 30 additional cloud services, which will be available in BlueMix, its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) designed to help developers quickly integrate applications and speed deployment of new cloud services.  In addition, IBM is launching a new sandbox capability, BlueMix Garages. These are collaborative locations where developers can create new apps on BlueMix, learn new development skills, and access IBM's developer ecosystem.

Built on open standards and leveraging Cloud Foundry, BlueMix has made major advancements since being announced  in February, including cloud integration services that enable a secure connection between an organisation's public applications and private data, and swift, secure and fast connections, via the cloud, between Internet of Things and machine to machine devices to store, query and visualise data.

It also adds data and analytics-as-a-service to allow the rapid design and scaling of applications that turn Big Data into competitive intelligence. Together with DevOps services that support the complete developer lifecycle.

IBM is rolling out BlueMix's foundation on SoftLayer, a move intended to combine the strength of IBM's middleware software with third-party and open technologies to create an integrated development experience in the cloud.

Using an open cloud environment, BlueMix helps both born-on-the-web and enterprise developers build applications with their choice of tools. With the ability to easily combine a variety of services and APIs from across the industry to compose, test and scale custom applications, developers will be able to cut deployment time from months to minutes.

"The adoption rate of BlueMix has been nothing short of phenomenal since being announced only a few short weeks ago," said Steve Robinson, General Manager of IBM Cloud Platform Services. "Rapidly growing numbers of beta participants are embracing our model of extending their existing assets and services into a cloud-based, open-source development platform, allowing our clients to bridge between the tools they are planning for the future and the workloads and services they use today to get them to market faster."

In the first eight weeks of BlueMix’s open beta launch, IBM has seen rapid adoption of the open platform with key clients and partners such as GameStop, Pitney Bowes, Continental Automotive and start-ups including EyeQ.

BlueMix provides cloud integration services to securely connect and integrate an organisation’s applications and information in the cloud. Developers can use pre-defined connectors for accelerated integration, or develop custom APIs as needed to easily and securely tie back into systems of record behind their firewall.

Integrated API management capabilities provide an easy mechanism to publish self-service APIs, that can be shared with the broader API economy. This allows developers to mix cloud-based PaaS, third party cloud applications, and on-premises systems behind security gateways, moving between cloud and on-premises systems in a hybrid, integrated environment.  

The burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) sector is also targeted with services allowing developers to register and connect networked devices such as microprocessors and embedded machine to machine sensors to the cloud, easily aggregating and reacting to data and events in real time. Organisations can build applications which efficiently manage, analyse, visualise, and interact with the massive quantities of temporal and spatial data generated by vehicles, wearables, mobile phones, cameras, computers, sensors and other intelligent devices.

Data and Analytics services are provided for developers to deliver data-centric mobile, web-scale applications. With these new services, including geospatial, time series, predictive scoring, and reporting, developers can easily create sophisticated applications that provide real-time actionable insight so that organisations can predict outcomes and make better business decisions.

DevOpsservices help developers, IT departments and business teams with an open, integrated rapid development environment that scales from individual developers to enterprise teams. The DevOps Continuous Integration service will provide end-to-end `build’ capabilities to speed changes through the development process. DevOps Mobile Quality Assurance (MQA) will help analyse user sentiment to spot problems before they go viral, and the Monitoring and Analytics service will identify application problems during development - leveraging analytics to help applications achieve availability and performance goals.

In addition, DevOps will include a new RapidApp service that requires no coding,using visual tools to expand the scope of web and business applications developers can create.

The new BlueMix Garages  are physical, collaborative spaces for developers, product managers and designers to collaborate with IBM experts to rapidly innovate and deliver new cloud applications to be deployed onto BlueMix.

The first IBM BlueMix Garage will be located in San Francisco’s South of Market neighbourhood – home to more startups per square foot than anywhere in the world. The Garage will sit in Galvanize, a startup hub which will provide a shared home to approximately 200 San Francisco startups by the end of 2014.

Working side-by-side with IBM consultants, partners and entrepreneurs, Garage users will transform application development with modern cloud technologies and highly disciplined agile processes.

Underpinned by a strong ecosystem, IBM aims to accelerate the pace at which cloud computing will transform global industries. Currently, IBM’s education, mentoring and innovation initiatives reach more than four million software developers worldwide, and more than 1000 startups across retail, healthcare, finance, agriculture, automotive and more.

The continued growth of the BlueMix community, as well as launches of additional BlueMix Garages, will help provide this network with the skills, innovation and tools needed to leverage the power of cloud to revolutionize the use of mobile, big data and more.