IBM has had a busy fortnight in London, England given that the company devotes a solid portion of its technology to providing the data analytics technologies behind the Wimbledon lawn tennis Championships.
But IBM has more than one division apparently… and so news this week widens out to inform us that the firm has announced that Bluemix, the company's open cloud development platform, is now generally available.
Bluemix aims to allow developers to mix and match different interoperable app services and tools. Running on SoftLayer's cloud infrastructure, Bluemix developers can use cloud power without having to configure infrastructure.
The Bluemix technology itself includes more than 50 services for building cloud-based business applications.
Pivotal VP of Product, Marketing, and Ecosystem for Cloud Foundry James Watters says that Bluemix furthers the Cloud Foundry vision for rapid app development and the ability for developers to work between platforms and tools from multiple providers.
In terms of usage, Bluemix draws upon IBM's middleware software — and there are also "open services and tools" from IBM partners and its developer ecosystem. The catalog includes tools in categories such as big data, social, mobile, security, and the Internet of Things.
"IBM continues to deploy more of its own technology onto Bluemix. For example, MQ Light messaging service is now available on Bluemix and IBM's Cloud Marketplace to help developers connect different components of an application together in the cloud — regardless of programming language. IBM also deployed Gamification services to Bluemix to help create new systems of engagement for cloud applications across a range of industries, which offer game-like incentives," said Pivotal's Watters.
New business partner services being added to Bluemix and the IBM Cloud Marketplace include Redis Cloud to help developers use the cloud to access huge volumes of data and run their Redis datasets. Bluemix users will now be able to connect to Redis using the IBM SoftLayer cloud.
