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IBM and Deutsche Telekom announced a collaboration to deliver the IBM MobileFirst platform in the cloud to small and midsize (SMB) customers in Europe.
Indeed, Deutsche Telekom’s developer platform—Developer Garden—has launched the new cloud service, the Developer Garden-powered IBM Worklight, which enables developers to quickly create apps for all mobile platforms and bring them to market faster.
“The partnership with Developer Garden at Deutsche Telekom will enable us to offer IBM Worklight on their cloud to a whole new market in Europe,” Marie Wieck, general manager of IBM Application & Integration Middleware, said in a statement. “Small to medium-sized businesses will now have access to the IBM MobileFirst enterprise-grade mobile platform to help them lower development costs, introduce mobile apps to the market more quickly and operate them more reliably.”
As mobile apps proliferate, the cloud has emerged as a key enabler of this growth, IBM said. Cloud delivery of mobile apps accelerates time to value and speed to market. A recent study from IBM revealed that while only 24 percent of telecom survey respondents currently use cloud for innovation, in two years more than half (57 percent) said they plan to use cloud computing for business model innovation.
By offering IBM Worklight on the Deutsche Telekom cloud via Developer Garden, SMBs that traditionally may not have the resources to obtain enterprise-grade mobile tools are now able to easily consume these technologies as a service without long-term investment or planning.
The new service combines the strengths of Deutsche Telekom’s Developer Garden with Worklight, IBM’s mobile application development platform, to provide organizations with instant access to Deutsche Telekom’s APIs and communication services and expertise. Developer Garden users will be able to quickly access IBM Worklight capabilities to efficiently develop, run and manage HTML5, hybrid and native apps that combine Deutsche Telekom’s communication features such as speech-driven Interactive Voice Response (IVR), voice mash-ups and Short Message Service (SMS).
For example, a retailer can increase customer retention by integrating geo-location capabilities from IBM Worklight and Deutsche Telekom’s SMS API into its mobile app. A customer can opt in for retailers to be notified when they are close to a physical store and receive customized promotions for same-day in-store purchases. A hotel can also improve customer service by using these same opt-in capabilities to be alerted when premium guests are nearby. This mobile feature can minimize a guest’s time waiting in long check-in lines, ensure their room is ready and make sure specific requests are met to enhance their experience with the brand.
“The collaboration between IBM and Deutsche Telekom Developer Garden enables us to offer new business models in the area of mobile app development and to unlock new value for our customers,” Rainer Deutschmann, senior vice president of Core Telco Products of Deutsche Telekom, said in a statement. “In addition, the data will be securely hosted on Deutsche Telekom’s servers in Germany and thus be subject to the strict German data protection provisions adding a layer of security and assurance to developers and enterprises working in the cloud.”
In a blog post about the collaboration, Richard Suselbeck, a senior developer evangelist at Deutsche Telekom, said Developer Garden-powered IBM Worklight combines three things:
“First, you get the full wealth of features of IBM Worklight. It starts with the development tools that help you to easily get started and build apps for a variety of platforms,” Suselbeck said.
“Next, we provide additional adapters. These are extensions that abstract services or back-ends away from you. By simply using them, you do not have to think about implementation details,” he said.
“On top, you get a preinstalled and fully configured server where your apps can be deployed and managed from, that is handling notifications and messaging towards your app clients and many more necessary features. Even better, we offer great scalability if your apps have specific needs,” Suselbeck added.