IBM Invests US$1Billion to Develop ‘Platform-as-a-Service’

IBM today announced a unique new development environment and capabilities-as-a-service to help clients and developers speed the adoption of “hybrid” clouds, which have the potential to usher in a new era of innovation across the enterprise. As part of its initiative, IBM has invested more than $1 billion for software cloud development and is launching new capabilities running on SoftLayer.

With today’s news, IBM is addressing three fundamental issues to help speed the adoption of hybrid clouds.

1)   Enabling enterprise developers for the cloud: According to Evans Data, there are more than 18 million software developers worldwide yet less than 25 percent are developing for the cloud today. As the industry moves to the cloud era, millions of developers are looking to access tools and services that will enable them to leverage this fast-emerging opportunity.

2)   Integrating across enterprise environments: Enterprises are looking to innovate and drive significant value in a new era of hybrid clouds, which link systems of engagement — built on mobile and social technologies and where consumers are engaging with organizations — with systems of record where data and transactions are processed.

3)   An open ecosystem and platform for development that accelerates innovation and fosters growth: Developers are looking for a dynamic application development environment to support the cloud era. A new development platform should be open and flexible and make it easier for corporate developers and independent companies alike to create applications and connect them to existing computing systems.

IBM Acquires NoSQL Database Startup Cloudant.

IBM acquires Cloudant

IBM today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Boston, MA-based Cloudant, Inc., a privately held database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider that enables developers to easily and quickly create next generation mobile and web apps. This announcement was made at the #IBMPulse conference at Las Vegas on Feb 24th.  Cloudant will extend IBM’s Big Data and Analytics, Cloud Computing and Mobile offerings by further helping clients take advantage of these key growth initiatives. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Clients across a variety of industries, including gaming, financial services, mobile device manufacturers, online learning, retail and healthcare are already using Cloudant technology.

Delivered as a managed cloud service, Cloudant technology ensures that app developers no longer need to be experts in database management, while database administrators (DBA) can focus on higher value tasks beyond day-to-day administration.

The acquisition of Cloudant will also strengthen IBM’s cloud solutions by providing developers with the tools and resources to build, test, deploy and scale cloud apps on a variety of hosting layers. Cloudant runs on the IBM SoftLayer platform today and extends IBM’s recent investment in the SoftLayer cloud infrastructure. As a global service sold in 140 countries, SoftLayer provides an easy cloud “on-ramp” to help clients quickly deploy mobile capabilities with the security, privacy and reliability of private clouds and the economy, flexibility and speed of a public cloud.