According to the research firm IDC, more than 65 percent of enterprises will commit to a hybrid cloud by 2016. With that change in architecture, organizations will face new challenges when it comes to accessing data on their legacy systems and public clouds: from having visibility into the applications across various clouds systems to ensuring that data is secure and managed in a way that adheres to local laws and regulations.
Today, at IBM InterConnect 2015, IBM announced a number of services, software, and partnerships that are designed to ease those frictions and more.
In 2014, IBM earned roughly $7 billion in cloud revenue, an increase of 60 percent year over year, and IBM SVP Cloud Robert LeBlanc said during a press conference here in Las Vegas today that IBM fully expects that growth to continue to outperform the broad cloud software and services market. Part of the strategy to get there was announced today.
The announcements, below, are made available APIs in IBM’s BluxMix cloud development platform for web and mobile apps:
Portability services: IBM says new open standard services will make it easier to move workloads across different environments.
IBM Enterprise Containers: According IBM, IBM Enterprise Containers will help developers to create and deliver applications via native Linux containers with Docker APIs to provide enterprise–class visibility, control and security and increased automation. Cloud applications, when necessary, could be transferred to on-premises infrastructure to improve security, performance, or for other factors.
BlueMix Local: BlueMix Local extends BlueMix into a company’s on-premises data center with borderless visibility and management across Bluemix environments: public, dedicated, and local. BlueMix Local will provide many of the developer services found today in IBM’s BlueMix cloud platform for enterprises to use on-premises. “BlueMix Local enables enterprises to bring their public cloud to on-premises and install capabilities found in public cloud behind the firewall and operate all of their clouds together,” said Damion Heredia, VP cloud platform services, IBM Cloud.
There were many other announcements today, regarding IBM’s push into hybrid cloud management with the goal to improve cloud visibility, control, and security.
Here are the relevant management tools IBM announced today:
IBM DataWorks: New, intuitive tooling and experience to find, refine, enrich and deliver trusted data. This allows developers to subdivide and manipulate data sets from the treasure trove of public and private data.
Collaborative Operations: Enhanced visibility and control of clients’ hybrid environments with a single, end-to-end view.
Orchestration: Available as a service enabling management across hybrid environments that is the largest federated orchestration library in the industry.
Security: New features that protect the most vital data and applications using analytics across the enterprise, public and private clouds and mobile devices.
Increasing Developer Productivity: New services that enable developers to more quickly, effectively, and securely connect apps, data and services across an open and flexible environment of traditional systems, cloud platforms and any device, seamlessly weaving data and services with APIs to compose new apps and services, including:
Secure Passport Gateway: Allows self-service to developers to securely connect data and services to Bluemix in minutes through a simple Passport service that keeps IT in control.
API Harmony: Find a perfect API match for a client’s application using the world’s largest knowledge base of APIs; easily expose and manage APIs.
Many of the services are based on open technologies, IBM said, including Cloud Foundry and OpenStack.
IBM also announced cloud related partnerships. IBM will team with Tech Mahindra to build a cloud-based development platform for its clients on BlueMix Dedicated – the BlueMix single-tenant edition. Tech Mahindra’s developers will now be able to build cloud-native and enabled applications. Tech Mahindra plans to train 5,000 of its own developers on building BlueMix apps.
Additionally, IBM is expanding its partnership with CSC, where CSC will extend BlueMix to CSC’s developer ecosystem as they build out their cloud apps and infrastructures. This partnership will be through the CSC IBM Center of Excellence.
Finally, IBM said that it would build more SoftLater computing capacity, this time with new cloud data centers eyed in Sydney and Montreal. Both centers will be open within the next 30 days. This is a big deal for customers in those regions, and follows similar recent expansion in Frankfurt, Germany; Querétaro, Mexico; and Tokyo, Japan.