I am here in London at the Cloud Forum! I had a great set of roundtables yesterday and got asked from many developers what do these announcements do for me!
So I took a stab at a high level view of the value!
Box
- Existing Bluemix developers can now leverage the world class Box cloud storage API and services for their mobile and web apps! (Box API will join the rest of 100+ Enterprise developer service tile on our Bluemix service specifically made for develoeprs)
- And existing Box developers can now enjoy the speed of creating new mobile and web apps integrating Box API on Bluemix developer cloud
- What’s more, IBM has built an extensive Enterprise Content Management capabilities
- content capture, extraction, analytics, case management and governance, that are complentary
- these solutions were already deployed in many large enterprises,
- now Box developers will be able to tap into these rich enterprise content
This is particularly interesting for developers want to get into a few specific high barrier-of-entry industries including healthcare and financial industry, because in the past, the data of these enterprises are held in a vault that is difficult to get.
For example, startups can create apps using IBM ECM API to extract contents data to feed into Watson, and then allow researchers to collaborate on Box platform using the insights generated from Watson.
Docker
By helping making Docker as the standard of “write code once, and take it anywhere“, it removes the lock in that many developers had to spent lots of time when they start their development on the cloud. (for example, it usually takes a couple of days to redeploy an app from developer’s own machine to AWS cloud)
Through this new partnership, IBM offers “IBM containers” for developers deploying their apps onto Bluemix (public cloud) and PureApp (private cloud) and the tools managing the containers,
For the large companies that are very picky on how/where apps get deployed, this new container eliminate the extra work developer need to spend to figure out how to deploy their apps into large enterprise’s private cloud.
Apple
To the iOS developers who wish to create enterprise apps which require server side data integration – the new IBM MobileFirst for iOS solutions extends IBM’s strengths of providing services and middleware with back-end support.
For many iOS apps that requiring backend services, regardless it is nodejs, Ruby on Rails or Java, Bluemix on the other hand provides composable service side app creation and deployment capabilities in an open and common environment.
For Developers who live and work with Xcode (the standard iOS app development tool made by Apple), the Mobile first and Bluemix provides common services such as Enterprise Cloud storage (include Box), backend integration, and Analytics (Watson) right inside Xcode. (btw, this is how IBM created 100+ native iOS apps for IBM enterprise clients)!!
The key here is Bluemix bring enterprise level integrity to the apps created on open source platform such as Cloud Foundry and Docker.