Las Vegas, NV – IBM today took several steps to flesh out its hybrid cloud strategy with announcements in data portability, public-private cloud integration and developer tools.
“We’re shifting our investments,” said Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president of cloud at IBM. “If you look at our investments, over half of it is in hybrid cloud. Over half of our development community is working on hybrid cloud today.”
Among key messages at the Interconnect 2015 opening day, LeBlanc emphasized that rather than only move data to the cloud, the company is also looking into ways to move the cloud to the data.
With IBM’s new Enterprise Containers, the company is hoping to allow developers to bring solutions developed in the cloud to on-premise systems for execution, in cases where data cannot be moved to the cloud due to sensitivity, size or performance, the company said in a statement.
The announcement comes in view of IBM’s SoftLayer expansion into Canada, with the company promising that Montreal’s new data centre will open within 30 days.
On the flip side, IBM is also facilitating the shift of IT environments with tools including DataWorks, which aims to “find, refine, enrich and deliver trusted data,” for manipulation between public and private environments. Meanwhile, tools to create visibility, control and management of hybrid environments, come in the form of Collaborative Operations and an Orchestration service.
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However, Big Blue’s biggest focus was on developers.
The company is ramping up its Bluemix platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering with the addition of its “Local” option in addition to Bluemix Public and Dedicated, the latter of which is a client’s own, single-tenant Bluemix environment hosted in an isolated SoftLayer instance and managed by IBM.
With the Local offering, Bluemix, now a year old, can be installed on a company’s own private cloud to provide API’s and services that are managed locally while remaining integrated with Public and Dedicated environments.
To sweeten the deal for developers, Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of IBM’s Watson Group announced that Watson’s analytical capabilities would be part of Bluemix, and that developers would even have access to what the company calls the world’s largest library of APIs through what’s known as API Harmony.
To showcase Bluemix’ integration with Watson, IBM brought several partners on stage, the majority of whom were from the medical sector. One by one they demonstrated apps that used DNA analytics to assess treatment risks, streamlined matchmaking between patients and clinical trials, and medical collaboration.
“All of these resources come together to infuse cognitive capabilities into your hybrid cloud and mobile applications,” said LeBlanc. “This technology is here today.”