IBM BlueMix Plays Key Role in Company’s PaaS Strategy

Charlotte Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

• The IBM BlueMix project is IBM’s cloud app development platform.
• BlueMix ‘patterns’ will integrate with PureApplication, SCAS and SoftLayer in 2013.

The pieces of the puzzle to IBM’s cloud strategy are coming together, especially between PaaS and IaaS, as well as new open source infrastructure options to help guard against the dreaded trap of vendor lock-in.  Furthering its efforts to demonstrate to enterprises how they can leverage the cloud for faster, more efficient app development/deployment, IBM made a number of strategic moves in 2013.  Starting with throwing its weight behind OpenStack early in the year, IBM later purchased SoftLayer to serve as the foundation of its hosting services capabilities and then partnered with, ironically, PaaS competitor Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s open source team to leverage Pivotal’s growing ecosystem.  Each of these moves play strategically into IBM’s newest cloud project – codenamed BlueMix.