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IBM has announced several new services, including a .NET Runtime, on its Bluemix Platform as a Service (PaaS). Announced at the Cloud Foundry Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., the new services will make it easier for developers to create cloud applications for mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), supply chain analytics and intelligent infrastructure solutions. They will be added to the more than 100 services already available in the Bluemix catalog, which also includes complementary analytics tools from IBM such as those found in the recently unveiled IoT Zone and Watson Zone.
IBM is adding more of its own technology into Bluemix, including Bluemix API Management, which enables developers to rapidly create, deploy, and share large scale APIs, and provides a simple and consumable way of controlling critical APIs. IBM also is adding new mobile capabilities available on Bluemix for the IBM MobileFirst Platform, which enables development of location-based mobile apps that connect insights from digital engagement and physical presence.
IBM announced several new ecosystem and third-party services being added to Bluemix. These include .NET Runtime in IBM Bluemix and open sourcing of .NET Buildpack which gives s developers in any Cloud Foundry- based environment the ability to leverage Microsoft’s development capabilities, making it easier to integrate multiple cloud workloads.
Other moves include the addition of the Namara.io platform by ThinkData Works, which aggregates and catalogues available open data into a single portal, providing businesses, developers, and citizens with API access to high- value information.
The Cupenya Insights service provides an analytics foundation that allows developers to connect and monitor business activities across several Bluemix applications; define key performance indicators, and receive performance overviews of an entire business process or supply chain.
The flowthings.io service by Flow Corporation collects real-time data and provides complex event processing and data delivery that make it easier to integrate applications with almost any software or device in the Internet of Things space.
Reappt from Push Technology delivers over the Internet to give apps a performance edge, the company said.
IBM’s Bluemix was created on open technologies that enable developers to build, run and manage cloud applications and services with more flexibility. It enables developers to mix and match different services and tools that best fit their strategy. IBM launched Bluemix with a $1 billion investment in 2014. Since then, it has become the largest Cloud Foundry deployment in the world, IBM said.
UIBM said it also is supporting the expansion of independent Cloud Foundry Dojo‘s by establishing the first IBM Cloud Foundry Dojo, located in Raleigh, NC. The IBM Cloud Foundry Dojo will be a physical place open to all developers where IBM will help accelerate skills on the Cloud Foundry Code base and mentor developers.
IBM Adds New Bluemix Services at Cloud Foundry Summit
IBM already has 12 Dojo graduates on its team, and a dedicated team of nine full- time developers to work solely on Cloud Foundry projects, including Elastic Runtime, Diego, Services, BOSH, CLI and Eclipse Tools for Cloud Foundry.
IBM has long supported open source organizations in addition to Cloud Foundry, recently unveiling IBM Containers, and a Docker-based container service delivered on Bluemix that includes open Docker-native features and interfaces, including the new Docker orchestration services. The IBM Containers service will enable enterprises to launch Docker containers directly onto the IBM Cloud on bare metal servers from SoftLayer.
IBM also announced that, according to a recent survey, U.S.-based developers cited IBM Bluemix as the most used platform-as-a-service. Enterprise Strategy Group conducted the survey of more than 325 developers and IT managers, mostly from organizations with 500 or more employees.
According to ESG’s analysis of the survey results, Bluemix adoption is growing 10 times faster on average than the other leading vendors in the PaaS market. It also has gained two percentage points of penetration per month since entering beta in 2014. Bluemix also ranked second in overall PaaS usage, with 19 percent of PaaS users surveyed citing it as their primary PaaS.
IBM said its total cloud revenue was $7.7 billion over the previous 12 months at the end of March 2015. Cloud revenue grew more than 60 percent in the first quarter of 2015. IBM’s cloud delivered as a service business, a subset of the total, includes PaaS.
”The Platform-as-a-Service market is now experiencing high growth and currently favors well established application development and deployment vendors who provide both PaaS and IaaS capabilities,” said Stephen D. Hendrick, principal analyst for application development research at ESG, in a statement.
All of the respondents in ESG’s survey were either using or currently evaluating a PaaS platform – or planned to do so within the next two years, the study showed.
IDC confirms this trend, saying that PaaS will be the fastest-growing area of the cloud market over the next three years.
This is significant because as developers and IT managers move more of their operations to the cloud, higher-value cloud offerings — such as mission- critical application development, testing, and deployment — which are delivered through PaaS, are beginning to account for a larger percentage of overall cloud spending.