IBM Launches Open Cloud Development Platform
It's open season for open source development, the latest example being a cloud-based platform launched this week by IBM along with the release of 50 projects designed to speed enterprise adoption of cloud-based development as well as new applications related to analytics and other cloud technologies.
The collaborative platform called DeveloperWorks Open and unveiled this week aims to give developers access to open source resources and projects with an emphasis on solving "real-world" problems. The company will open up 50 projects focused on analytics, mobile and cloud technologies. The services also will be offered on IBM's cloud-based programming platform, Bluemix.
Angel Diaz, IBM's vice president for cloud architecture and technology, said the 50 tools and services would be available by the end of this year.
In an effort to promote Bluemix, the company also said it is working with 200 universities and research institutes to provide free access to its cloud platform to develop analytics, Internet of Things and other future applications.
Another impetus for the app development effort is what IBM considers "the open source communities [lack of] strategic focus [on] business requirements." Hence, the new open source projects focus on sectors like health care, retail, insurance and banking.
"These industry-based tools enable and empower developers to [begin] innovating on solutions to real-world, industry problems," Diaz stressed.
Another group of projects target analytics technologies, including expansion of access to Apache Spark, and an "agentless system crawler" providing visibility into cloud platforms and runtimes.
IBM said it also would release a cloud data services platform for object storage on Bluemix that can be used to integrate OpenStack Swift with Cloud Foundry. The service is designed to enable quick access to cloud data without a requirement for knowing where data is stored.
As IBM's overall revenue continues to decline, the company this week reported strong annual cloud revenues totaling $8.7 billion, a 70 percent increase year-on-year. IBM's analytics revenues are also rising, up 20 percent over the previous quarter.
"The market continues to evolve beyond pure infrastructure toward higher value process-, data- and analytics-as-a-service engagements, in the same way the Internet evolved from browsing to a full transactional business platform," IBM CFO Martin Schroeter said during an earnings call this week. "Our clients are finding value in the combination of public, private and hybrid implementations."
The company also said its security business revenues rose10 percent during the first six months of 2015.
The company is "repositioning" its systems portfolio, citing a 50 percent increase in System z revenues during the first half of this year. It also claimed growth for its Power systems during the first six months of 2015, fueled by growth in "scale out systems," according to Schroeter.
