Celebrating Bluemix 

As you might know, Bluemix is the new PaaS offering from IBM, due for release in the beginning of July 2014.  It builds on Cloud Foundry Open Source PaaS from Pivotal, and also adds a plethora of new services (mostly IBM software, but also community and third party based), DevOps integration, Web interfaces and support for other Software Defined Environment offerings such as Softlayer.

During the last couple of weeks, I helped organize a Bluemix event at IBM, where together with a couple of other colleagues we held presentations and organized a JAM event with prizes.   We had management support, and managed to secure substantial prizes of around $2000 in value.

We were happy to see that this event sparkled interest and enthusiasm among the participants, and that even if organizing such events seemed hard at the beginning, the feeling that we had afterwards was more than worth the effort.

We plan to hold additional cloud based meetups in the future, touching specific cloud areas such as Big Data, Internet of Things, Mobile and others.

With this occasion, I held a presentation on the business objectives and gains that the new IBM PaaS offering brings on the time to value and cost reductions areas.

I also briefly touched on the "Composable Business" "Holy Graal" objective that the IT strives to attain in order to support the businesses in their course changes - so that they adapt to the market conditions.

Currently, the IT departments are taking months/years to build and provision applications aimed at supporting the new business objectives.  This of course results in rather large time to value and costs for the businesses themselves.  While this is not necessarily bad, it can certainly be improved.   There were also attempts to improve these operational parameters in the past - with switches from Waterfall development styles/processes to more agile ones.  Significant gains have been experienced.   However, this could be further improved through employing new tooling and approaches that would help IT even further bridge the gap to time to value and cost reductions the businesses seek.

The new PaaS offering from IBM is supposed to enable the "API Economy" - so that building new services, applications and reusing the existing ones is going to be very easy.  Interconnecting with Cloud APIs residing on other clouds, integrations with legacy applications and services residing on legacy enterprise environments - all should become straightforward.

As the developers, companies, ISVs are going to construct these building blocks, the ITs will be able to leverage them in order to "stitch together" mobile, and cloud applications in record times - therefore making use of the "composable business" pieces.   The time to value and costs will go down even more, and IT will be able to support the business direction changes quicky - enabling them to cash in on the market trends with much more agility.

I foresee that in the coming years the PaaS offerings from ISVs - including IBM - will mature, and that this DevOps in Cloud model will extend even more.  By then, the composable services will grow in size and number, enabling the API Economy and effectively allowing IT departments to use the "composable business" approach when developing new features and applications.