In the battle for the middleware PaaS market, the opportunity is huge and competition fierce. As IBM remixes its business services to match client demand for scalable cloud solutions, BlueMix appears to be one of IBM’s better bets. Tackling the white hot markets of Big Data and the Internet of Things, SiliconANGLE Founder John Furrier calls this opportunity the “perfect storm of innovation.” And to discuss this market opportunity for IBM, theCUBE invited Meg Swanson, Director, Marketing for BlueMix. On theCUBE with Furrier and Wikibon Co-Founder Dave Vellante, Swanson discussed IBM’s commitment to developers and how IBM differentiates from other powerhouses like Microsoft and HP.

The developer ecosystem (DevOps) isn’t a layup for IBM. Heck, DevOps isn’t a layup for anyone. But IBM is invested in DevOps and BlueMix as a Platform-as-a-Service. As proof, Swanson shared that IBM has 4 million users in Developer Works, an open repository on GitHub, and multiple team members on Stack Overflow. In essence, IBM is puttings is ‘money’ where its ‘mouth’ is.

“What’s exciting about BlueMix is that we’ve done a lot of research with developers and with our beta clients, from large enterprise, down to a two person start-up, so we’ve got all ranges,” Swanson said. “What’s the optimal development platform? It’s huge to us that its open standards and open-source based, huge that you can use the programming languages that you’re used to.”

Down to the way they named their services inside of BlueMix, IBM ‘speaks developer speak’. BlueMix is based on Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and core to BlueMix is that it’s based on open standards. That means developers are able to pick the best services for their needs, whether that be IBM, third party, third party partner or open source.

Vellante asked a pretty direct question as to how this will all work for IBM’s business. More specifically, how  is IBM differentiating from the other big players like Microsoft and HP? How does IBM plan to get the mindshare for developers?

Swanson said, “You don’t ever own the developer mindshare, right? And I think that’s the approach. You listen to the development community and at the end of the day you have to provide the best content, the best platform and the fastest way to develop. And the companies that are going to step forward and do that and support the way and the model that developers want to work in, are the ones that, you don’t win the community, but you gain credibility and you start co-building together.”

As a marketer, Swanson is well aware of how developers generally feel towards marketers. “The second you show up as marketing you’ve lost,” she said. “You have to learn to be organic and work with developers.”

Again, as proof of their commitment, she listed six things that BlueMix drives home in its messaging to developers:

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1. Be transparent about the product.
2. What can we provide them?
3. Don’t oversell.
4. Show the applications that companies ‘like you’ are using.
5. Highlight cost and time savings.
6. Completely free. Open Beta, open feedback.

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Previously on theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Pulse 2014, Steve Mills, Senior VP & Group Executive, IBM Software & Systems talked about how creativity was the key to BlueMix. Swanson followed that up by sharing how at IBM’s two-day developer ‘happening’ (not a full conference), it created experiences where developers could be hands-on with technologies. “Our own team even took the Oculus Rift, (a virtual reality headset for 3D gaming), and said how can we build applications for this?”

Big Data Analytics is massive, and IBM acknowledges that. The future for BlueMix holds a lot of customer feedback and iterations. To summarize Swanson said, “Listening to the feedback and building out more around the Internet of Things and more around Big Data Analytics and continue to build and deliver on our roadmap.”