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Signaling a ramp up of its efforts to bring more developers into its cloud ecosystem, IBM today announced a new platform for developers to collaborate on a newly released set of open source technologies.
IBM will release 50 projects to the open source community to help speed enterprise adoption and spur a new class of cloud innovations around mobile, analytics and other growth areas.
IBM’s new developerWorks Open is a cloud-based environment for developers to access emerging IBM technologies, technical expertise and collaborate with a global network to accelerate projects. IBM announced the new effort at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2015 conference in Portland, Ore.
“IBM firmly believes that open source is the foundation of innovative application development in the cloud,” said Dr. Angel Diaz, IBM vice president of Cloud Architecture and Technology, in a statement. “With developerWorks Open, we are open sourcing additional IBM innovations that we feel have the potential to grow community and ecosystem and eventually become established technologies.”
On developerWorks Open, developers can download code and access blogs, videos, tools and techniques to accelerate their efforts.
IBM officials said the current model of development in the open source community lacks a strategic focus on business requirements. To address this, IBM is launching a set of projects in industries including healthcare, mobile, retail, insurance and banking. The company hopes to remove the obstacles that inhibit developers from turning open source code into sustainable applications.
IBM also is offering new services on the company’s Bluemix Platform- as- a -Service and open-sourcing a number of apps from its MobileFirst portfolio that will assist developers in the healthcare, retail insurance and SMB mobile markets. These include the IBM Ready App for Healthcare, which tracks patient progress for at-home physical therapy programs via a mobile device. IBM also open-sourced the IBM Ready App for Retail, which personalizes and reshapes the specialty retail store shopping experience. Two other open-sourced apps are the IBM Ready App for Insurance, which improves the relationship between homeowners and insurers and uses Internet of Things sensors to synch home with utilities, and the IBM Ready App for Small Business Banking, which helps financial institutions address the mobile needs of small business owners and attract prospects.
Big Blue also open-sourced some of its analytics technologies and cloud data services. On that front, IBM announced it is open-sourcing Activity Streams, which provides developers with a standard model and encoding format for describing how users engage with both the application and with one another. The other analytics technology IBM is open-sourcing is the Agentless System Crawler, which is a cloud monitoring and analytics framework that enables visibility into all types of cloud platforms and runtimes. IBM also open-sourced its Object Storage on Bluemix Service Broker, a cloud data service that can be used to integrate OpenStack Swift with Cloud Foundry, allowing fast access to cloud data without needing to know where the data is stored.
IBM developerWorks Open follows in the footsteps of IBM’s developerWorks, which has long been a key source of information for developers using IBM, open-source and third-party technologies.
IBM participates in and contributes to more than 150 open source projects. These projects include Spark, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Open Contain Project, Node.js, CouchDb, Linux, Eclipse and several Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects.
IBM Woos Cloud Developers via New Programs
IBM also introduced a new effort to help the next generation of developers in the Academic Initiative for Cloud, which is aimed at teaching college students about using IBM Cloud technologies.
The new program will create cloud development curricula using Bluemix in over 200 universities, reaching more than 20,000 students in 36 countries. And IBM announced a series of industry hackathons, expected to reach tens of thousands of new developers, and a set of diversity programs for women coders, all based on Bluemix.
By making the use of Bluemix available to these programs, IBM is offering up its Bluemix catalog of more than 100 tools and services including both open-source technologies and IBM and third-party services like Watson, Internet of Things, big data and analytics and mobile, among others.
“Putting Bluemix in the hands of today’s and tomorrow’s innovators creates the opportunity to foster a new generation of talent in cloud application development,” said IBM General Manager for Cloud Ecosystem and Developers, Sandy Carter, in a statement. “Our commitment to provide deep cloud expertise to programs aimed at future cloud developers from academics to professionals is necessary to sustain the growth our industry forecasts.”
Starting this fall, universities around the world will offer more than 250 courses and programs that will use educational materials, technologies and methodologies from IBM with a focus on using Bluemix in a variety of courses. These range from computer science, information technology, analytics and data science to mobile and entrepreneurship. Carnegie Mellon University, University of California at Berkeley and Irvine, Northwestern University, University of Southern California and International Institute of Information Technology in India are among participating universities. Additionally, IBM is launching a new Student Developer Community that helps students get started on the cloud and provides access to learning resources and information on how students can join Bluemix U.
IBM also announced enhanced support for Girls Who Code. With only 14 percent of computer science graduates being women today, down from 37 percent in 1984, IBM is committed to supporting programs that empower women in technology and address the lack of women in technology professions, the company said.
IBM is working with Girls Who Code to introduce the next generation of women developers to cloud innovation by hosting a class of female high-school students in New York City for a seven-week summer immersion program. For 2016, IBM says it will further expand its relationship with the organization to support additional programs in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, alongside continued support for the New York City summer immersion program.
IBM also announced a new collaboration with GSVlabs on the ReBoot Accelerator for Women, a program designed to help women in tech become current as they return to work after a multi-year sabbatical.