IBM launches Cloud marketplace
Summary: The tech giant said the app exchange is a digital front door that opens up its in-house services portfolio, along with those of its partners, to enterprise clients.
zdnet.com
By Natalie Gagliordi for Between the Lines | April 28, 2014 -- 04:05 GMT (21:05 PDT)
The land of cloud marketplaces just got a new resident — IBM.
On Monday, the tech giant launched the IBM Cloud marketplace, Big Blue's bid to offer enterprises a seamless transition to cloud and speed the adoption of hybrid clouds. With their ability to combine on-premise and cloud applications, hybrid clouds increasingly are being viewed as the norm. Analyst group Gartner has said 50 percent of enterprises will have hybrid clouds in place within three years.
The Cloud marketplace will initially launch services ranging from big data analytics to security and mobile, with provider partners including Zend, SendGrid, MongoDB, NewRelic, Redis Labs, Sonian, Flow Search Corp, Twilio, and Ustream.
IBM is also accelerating its expansion of the BlueMix open cloud platform. When it launched BlueMix with a billion-dollar investment back in February, IBM opened its middleware stack to its SoftLayer Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud. The platform offers an entry point for developers to build and test applications in a sandbox-like environment before potentially offering them for sale in the IBM Cloud marketplace. IBM is now launching more than 30 new services in BlueMix from IBM and partners for growth areas such as big data and analytics, cloud integration, dev-ops, and Internet of Things.
IBM's announcement builds on its march toward assembling a comprehensive cloud portfolio with a series of investments — $1.2 billion with global data center expansion for SoftLayer, $1 billion for establishing Blue PaaS, and more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions, including Aspera, Cloudant and Silverpop.
Robert LeBlanc, SVP of IBM software and cloud solutions, said in prepared remarks:
Increasingly, cloud users from business, IT and development across the enterprise are looking for easy access to a wide range of services to address new business models and shifting market conditions. IBM Cloud marketplace puts big data analytics, mobile, social, commerce, integration — the full power of IBM-as-a-Service and our ecosystem — at our clients' fingertips to help them quickly deliver innovative services to their constituents. |
