IBM's Cloudant and BlueMix for Hybrid Cloud
IBM has made strides in the hybrid cloud marketplace, and their latest acquisitions of Cloudant and BlueMix only highlight IBM’s commitment to the enterprise cloud. It was reported that IBM recently reallocated $1B in efforts to catapult their hybrid cloud model. With the purchases of Cloudant and BlueMix, IBM looks to beef up their Database as a Service model as well as their Platform as a Service model.
BlueMix allows users to build on top of open standards. When users want to create a new application in the cloud, BlueMix lets them create new functionality with just a few taps on the screen. IBM has noted that this is the future of the cloud and presenters at the IBM Pulse 2014 conference seemed to harp on this point. IBM VP Robert LeBlanc was quoted as saying, “A lot of people are building new mobile applications and systems of engagement.” LeBlanc went continued on by saying, “The biggest challenge is to connect those to the back end, and we can now connect the enterprise data to the cloud.”
BlueMix ties in perfectly with Cloudant. The Cloudant acquisition was a key part of IBM’s hybrid cloud push. Since Cloudant has received so much positive feedback for their NoSQL platform, it seems to become a perfect fit for developers in the cloud. Cloud development often centers on SQL, JSON or NOSQL and Cloudant can provide scalable cloud solution for any of the Database as a Service models.
At Pulse 2014, LeBlanc notably said “The cloud shift is the same shift that happened in client server computing and web computing, this is the next generation. Those lasted decades, and we believe that will be the case here.” IBM seems to put their money where their mouth is. Big Blue recently sold much of its traditional hardware manufacturing rights to Lenovo in a multi-billion dollar sale. With this new found capital, IBM will continue to snatch up small, robust cloud development companies to add their functionality into their ever expanding public, hybrid and private cloud environments.
