IBM launched a new set of services for its Bluemix Platform as a Service (PaaS) that brings enhanced analytics and data warehousing capabilities to the platform.
With the new services, developers can add analytics capabilities into cloud-based applications. The new IBM Cloud tools, which include the IBM Streaming Analytics service, enable developers to integrate both data analytics and visualization in their apps.
Now in open beta, the new IBM Streaming Analytics service provides the capability to analyze data, scaling to thousands of sources, on the cloud. The Streaming Analytics service also enables developers to visualize data and focus on building business logic and analytics.
In addition, IBM has updated its dashDB hosted data warehousing solution for the cloud. The updated IBM dashDB service is a high performance, massively scalable cloud data warehouse service that enables simple and speedy information management, analytics and business intelligence operations in the cloud. Among the updates to dashDB include support for enterprise performance, in that IBM added massively parallel processing (MPP) capabilities to enable faster query processing and overall scalability.
IBM also enhanced dashDB’s compatibility with Oracle and Netezza. dashDB MPP connects with an organization’s existing database investments to provide high performance based on IBM’s massively parallel processing cluster architecture. Also, with Netezza integration, businesses can solve complex problems faster with built-in Netezza analytics libraries, and integration with Watson Analytics, R, Cognos and third party business intelligence toolsets including Looker, Aginity Workbench and Tableau. dashDB also can integrate with Twitter data and Open Data, and supports data preparation with DataWorks.
IBM said Bluemix has, on average, been growing at more than 15,000 new users per week, nearly doubling since May. The company is seeing strong growth in enterprise sign-ups, followed by startups and academia.
Meanwhile, combining Bluemix and IBM Design Thinking methodology, the Bluemix Garage network creates a bridge between the scale of enterprises and the culture of startups, by establishing physical collaboration spaces housed in the heart of thriving entrepreneurial communities. IBM has established Bluemix Garages in San Francisco, London and, most recently, Toronto.
The company’s Bluemix Garage strategy is meant to meet developers on their home turf and to help enterprises of all sizes to accelerate the development of cloud applications by using IBM Cloud technologies with design thinking methodology and agile development capabilities.
“Bluemix Garages help enterprises harness the spirit and pace of startups while pouring back into the local community with mentorship and skills development on the latest cloud technologies,” said Steve Robinson, general manager of Cloud Platform Services at IBM, in a statement. “Today’s rapid app development cycles require developers to use new tools and methodologies from across the ecosystem to quickly turn new ideas into enterprise-class cloud applications at consumer scale and innovate at the speed of cloud.”
The Toronto Bluemix Garage will be located at the DMZ at Ryerson University, a university-based incubator in Canada. By combining IBM’s cloud ecosystem with DMZ’s network of international partners and in-house expertise, the Toronto Bluemix Garage experts will mentor the rising numbers of developers and startups in the region to create of the next generation of cloud apps and services using IBM’s platform-as-a-service, Bluemix.
Last year, IBM pledged to invest $1 billion to create a market around Bluemix, and the company is putting its money where its mouth is. The developer-friendly, open-standards-based Bluemix catalog includes over 100 tools and services, including prominent open-source technologies combined with IBM and third-party services, to enable developers to rapidly build cloud applications by tapping into a growing ecosystem of runtime frameworks and services.