IBM Showcases Cloud Marketplace, ‘Composable Business’ at Impact 2014

By Darryl K. Taft

As the world moves to more of a mobile-first, cloud-first entity, businesses need to constantly reinvent and innovate their processes by tapping big data.

At Impact 2014, IBM shed more light on its “composable business” strategy. A “composable” business promotes reinvention and process innovation, improves decision making from actionable insights, and speeds time to market.

A composable business takes a mixture of cloud, mobile and big data.

Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president of IBM Software & Cloud Solutions, talks about building a composable business.

In a composable business, IT leaders need to focus on the cloud.

Developers need access to APIs as the API economy becomes a key element of this approach.

At IBM Impact 2014, IBM introduced its new Cloud Marketplace, which is more than an app store, claims LeBlanc.

This image shows the face of the IBM Cloud Marketplace with biz, dev and ops services.

IBM has enlisted a number of partners to provide their services on the IBM Cloud Marketplace.

IBM announced a series of new services for its BlueMix platform as a service (PaaS), including for the Internet of things.

IBM announced a new effort to help startups easily build apps around the IBM BlueMix PaaS—the IBM BlueMix Garage. In conjunction with Galvanize, IBM opened the first BlueMix Garage in San Francisco to mentor entrepreneurs starting new tech businesses on the cloud.

Marie Wieck, IBM’s general manager of MobileFirst, introduces new services and Ready Apps for MobileFirst.

The new MobileFirst app dev platform features enhancements to IBM’s Worklight platform, BlueMix Mobile Cloud Services and the IBM-owned Cloudant database as a service (DBaaS).

IBM announced new industry-specific Ready Apps for its MobileFirst platform.

IBM introduced new MobileFirst Studios consisting of experts, services and training to help mobile enterprises.

One thousand developers responded to the question of what they would do with IBM’s Watson cognitive computing technology. This chart depicts their sentiment.

Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of IBM’s Watson Group, talks about opportunities with Watson.

IBM announced the Watson Developer Cloud Enterprise, which is an effort to provide enterprise developers with access to the Watson Developer Cloud.

IBM says developers hold the key to innovation, and Big Blue is doing all it can to empower developers with new tools for cloud and mobile development.