IBM Expands Its App Development Platforms: Opens Cloud Marketplace

Monday, May 5, 2014

IBM has expanded its MobileFirst Application Development portfolio including the addition of new industry-specific IBM Ready Apps. It has also announced the opening of 18 new IBM MobileFirst studios around the world.

The IBM MobileFirst Application Development portfolio offers tools for developers to create, deploy and manage mobile apps, on-premise or in the cloud. The IBM portfolio includes IBM Worklight, Cloudant and BlueMix technologies and services.

IBM Worklight is a mobile enterprise app development platform deployed on a client’s IT infrastructure, while BlueMix delivers similar capabilities as cloud-based services. Both can be used with Cloudant, IBM's NoSQL distributed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) for mobile apps.

A new version of IBM Worklight integrates additional mobile app lifecycle capabilities. IBM Worklight now allows enterprises to optimize mobile user experiences by supporting both native (via SDKs) and hybrid development models, as well as adding new capabilities such as the USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) protocol for mobile money solutions in emerging markets.

The BlueMix Platform-as-a-Service provides app creation and deployment capabilities in an open, common environment to reduce complexity. Both IBM Worklight and BlueMix offer mobile quality assurance capabilities to help developers track user experiences and provide sentiment analysis, crowd sourced feedback submissions, and in-context crash reports that identify problems for rapid resolution.

The IBM MobileFirst Business Acceleration portfolio offers IBM Ready Apps, a suite of industry-specific, pre-configured apps. Organizations can also tailor the look and feel of apps and add features using built-in integration with common industry APIs.

IBM Ready Apps include those for banking, retail, healthcare, insurance, travel and transportation, government and connected devices. IBM Ready App for Connected Home users can control and configure devices throughout their home such as setting the thermostat, arming the in-home alarm system, turning lights on or off, and setting/adjusting appliance settings.

IBM Ready App for Retail will help retailers benefit from the use of an in-store performance dashboard to track productivity, look up inventory and view store maps to analyze in-store foot traffic to prioritize customer service.

The new IBM MobileFirst studios further the expansion of the IBM Interactive Experience Labs and are located in major global cities including Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; Bangalore, India; Beijing, China; Boston, Mass.; Chicago, Ill.; Dallas, Texas; Ehningen, Germany; Groningen, Netherlands; La Gaude, France; London, UK; Melbourne, Australia; Mexico City, Mexico; New York City, NY; Sao Paolo, Brazil; Shanghai, China; Tokyo, Japan; and Toronto, Canada.

The new Cloud Marketplace provides an integrated, cloud-based development environment where individual developers, development shops and enterprise development teams can build enterprise applications via services and application protocol interfaces (APIs). These applications can be integrated in hybrid on premise and off premise cloud environments. It is built on an open environment so developers can choose any open source or third party tools and integrate apps, as needed.