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LAS VEGAS—IBM touted its support for openness and noted that its open standard approach to the cloud has brought significant opportunity.
At the IBM Pulse 2014 conference here, IBM announced that it is accelerating the adoption of cloud computing through growth in the ecosystem that includes working with key open technology organizations that are focused on simplifying and speeding application deployment on the cloud.
Specifically, IBM was just named as a founding member of jQuery, home to a JavaScript community committed to simplifying coding tasks. By joining the jQuery Foundation, IBM continues an ongoing commitment to contribute to open technology efforts critical to today’s leading open cloud architectures. jQuery simplifies how the industry builds Web applications. IBM uses jQuery broadly across its portfolio, including its popular IBM MobileFirst platform for enterprise mobile solutions.
In addition, IBM will join Pivotal and a number of other companies to establish the Cloud Foundry Foundation to help drive global collaboration with developers and cloud computing technologists. In doing so, they will seek to produce a ubiquitous platform-as-a-service (PaaS) open-source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. IBM will also be a platinum-level sponsor for Cloud Foundry and will become a member of its board of directors, taking an active role in developing and promoting the Cloud Foundry project.
“Independent foundations like Cloud Foundry and jQuery are important steps toward building an industry-wide open cloud architecture and simplify how Web-based applications are built and deployed,” Dr. Angel Diaz, IBM’s vice president of Open Technology and Cloud Performance Solutions, said in a statement. “To support this, IBM will join these foundations and take an active role in developing and promoting both communities.”
Additionally, IBM continues to drive industry adoption of the OASIS Topology & Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) standard to address the demand for portability of workloads. TOSCA, co-chaired by IBM, is now gaining traction within the growing OpenStack Heat Orchestration Template (HOT) project. As the community explores alignment with TOSCA, they will demonstrate how cloud applications can be modeled, shared, deployed and managed, seamlessly, among products and cloud platforms, from multiple vendors.
IBM has also worked with Mirantis, a pure-play OpenStack vendor, to demonstrate that SoftLayer is a suitable platform to build scalable OpenStack clouds for enterprises, partners and developers. Through benchmarks, SoftLayer’s bare-metal infrastructure has been proven as a platform to run OpenStack at massive scale.
IBM’s ongoing support of OpenStack as a founding and platinum sponsor and now Cloud Foundry, jQuery and TOSCA builds the company’s legacy of supporting open standards and open-source initiatives to provide value to clients and create a stronger ecosystem to fuel innovation and drive success.
To foster adoption for the cloud and other industry initiatives that IBM believes will speed growth, IBM’s Ecosystem Development business unit works with the company’s business partners, as well as academics, entrepreneurs and IT professionals to help them become “best of breed” on IBM platforms.
IBM continues to grow its ecosystem and is positioned to help business partners transform with cloud computing by coordinating talent, acquisitions & R&D to build a comprehensive cloud portfolio.
IBM business partners and ecosystem participants who have benefited and can benefit from cloud include:
–100-plus referring and selling partners for IBM SaaS portfolio;
–Startups: 2,000-plus members with cloud offerings;
–Commercial Developers: 1,250-plus cloud solution ISVs; 1.6M cloud developerWorks profiles;
–Individual Developers: 4,800-plus cloud communities on developerWorks;
–Born on Cloud Partners: 1,000-plus cloud-based managed service partners (MSPs);
–Business Partners: 1,000-plus value-added resellers and distributors with an IBM Cloud mark;
–Influencers: 200-plus Champions on Cloud and related areas: mobile, social, big data; and
–Academia: 100 universities, 200 faculty, 2,000-plus students in 20 countries on cloud.
The ecosystem will also benefit from a number of recent moves IBM has made to enhance its cloud initiatives, including the company’s $1.2 billion investment to expand its global cloud offerings. Now the ecosystem will have greater access to IBM cloud resources via a network of cloud centers.
Moreover, IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer last year also accelerates the adoption of cloud and provides a faster and simpler “on ramp” for cloud for “born on the Web” businesses to adopt cloud services in a secure and open environment.