Angel Luis Diaz (@AngelLuisDiaz, right) is a busy man. In addition to running IBM’s cloud technology operations, he’s in charge of the company’s San Jose, CA lab and one of its leading evangelists for open-source software. He’s also in charge of development of Bluemix, the IBM platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that Technology Business Research recently ranked as the top revenue-producing PaaS in the industry.

IBM has come under some criticism for not challenging the leaders in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) more aggressively, but IBM says it’s not interested in being the number one public cloud vendor. Rather, it’s targeting customers who are interested in flexible deployment across public, private and hybrid cloud architectures as well as applications that move fluidly between them. That’s what Bluemix is all about. Diaz took time out to update us on Bluemix and how it relates to IBM’s bigger cloud story

How does Bluemix fit into the bigger overall cloud strategy at IBM?

Bluemix sits on top of SoftLayer [IBM’s infrastructure-as-a-service] and lets developers write applications, test and deploy in seconds. We’re getting about 20,000 new developers signing up for Bluemix each week. Whatever way you choose to build your application, you can take advantage of a wide range of tools and runtimes on Bluemix.

The mega-power is when developers see the palette of APIs they can use to do things like sentiment analysis on reviews or visual recognition or speech-to-text. You can use APIs to get up-to-the second weather data, so if you’re an insurance agent you can know that a hail storm is coming so you can send alerts to reduce the costs of claims. We provide a host of data APIs, Twitter feeds, cognitive capability and other features developers want. And we’re building industry-specific clouds as well.

We don’t hear much these days about SoftLayer, the IaaS company you purchased three years ago. Is the public cloud business being de-emphasized for the sake of hybrid cloud?

SoftLayer is the foundation of our public cloud, and we continue to grow that business. We go at cloud from multiple dimensions. We need to have IaaS, and we have a unique approach with dedicated servers and even bare-metal options. But the bigger issue is to improve customers’ business processes. That’s the area Bluemix has carved out. We’re evolving beyond compute and storage to making customers more productive.

Whether it’s a big company like Marriott or a smaller one like Bitly, they choose our cloud because we’re delivering business value. And the way we approach cloud is unique.

IBM describes Bluemix as a “platform for the use of the most prominent open-source compute technologies.” Does that mean proprietary technologies have no place there?

Nothing is stopping you from having a proprietary runtime. What’s nice about the model we have – whether it’s Cloud Foundry or containers or OpenWhisk [IBM’s event-based processing service] – is that it allows for multiple runtimes and data types to work. Bluemix is the best place to do open source development using the skills you already have. Then we provide runtimes from IBM and our competitors for whatever you might need.

Last fall you announced Bluemix Local, which is essentially a private cloud service. What’s the status of that?

We have the ability to give people a managed local OpenStack cloud through Blue Box [Group Inc., which IBM acquired last summer] and to provision Bluemix locally. Sometimes developers want to build out applications locally and then tier them. So this allows them to build the application one way and then deploy as needed. That’s what we call choice with consistency.

How much demand are you actually seeing for Bluemix behind the firewall?

It’s growing. We live in a hybrid world. A lot of the world’s transactions run on IBM systems. Having the on-premise model is important. Clients are interested in all types of deployment.

What are you doing to reach the localized small businesses who are the core of the prospect base for Bluemix Local?

We have a meetup strategy. In fact, we have one coming up at DockerCon in two weeks. We call it an open architecture day. We also have more than 200 universities that have signed up to use Bluemix.

Are there any new developments to report in the three months since you announced the partnership with VMware?

We’ve got lots of clients signed up. Our partnership provides great efficiency for clients who want to move VM assets to the public cloud like SoftLayer. Once those applications are running on SoftLayer they can go to hybrid cloud by exposing an API in Bluemix and connecting to it.

Several vendors, including Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., have recently announced “cloud-in-a-box” products. Does IBM intend to play there?

We don’t have what you’d call a “cloud in the box,” but when you get Bluemix local or Blue Box, you do get a set of hardware you can run it on and we can manage it for your remotely.

Image courtesy IBM