The public cloud theme has predictably carried over from IBM’s February Pulse conference to its executive-oriented Impact summit in Las Vegas this week, where of many of the products that debuted three months ago are making an appearance once again in the company’s newly introduced enterprise app store. The rollout represents the latest and one of the most significant milestones in the IT stalwart’s efforts to offset the decline in on-premise software licenses and hardware with on-demand managed solutions.

Officially announced  this morning after days of speculation, the IBM Cloud Marketplace is meant to bring together the vendor’s formidable array  of more than 100 mostly  disparate services and developer tools in a cohesive portfolio similar to AWS. There are a number of important differences between the two, however, which IBM hopes will set it apart in the enterprise arena.

The offerings in Big Blue’s cloud store are divided into three distinct categories based on the target audience: line-of-business users, IT managers or developers.  For the former two segments, the vendor offers a wide range of role-specific software-as-a-service solutions ranging from data analytics tools to traditional financial management apps, with the goal of allowing customers to easily consume IT while keeping the CIO in the loop. It’s another case of ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’, an increasingly recurring theme among incumbent enterprise vendors, including many of IBM’s traditional competitors, a sizable percentage of which are also well under way in their cloud transitions.

For developers, the IBM Cloud Marketplace offers an equally compelling proposition, providing a single point of access to the firm’s catalog of infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service solutions. The line up consists of the IaaS portfolio Big Blue obtained as part of the 2013 acquisition of SoftLayer for $2 billion and a number of newer components it bolted onto the base platform, notably BlueMix, which combines homegrown middleware components with the open source Cloud Foundry project. Originally announced at the Pulse conference, the developer toolkit is reportedly being augmented with over 30 new DevOps, analytics and connected device management services as part of the Cloud Marketplace launch.

In addition to IBM products, the store will also feature third party software from Zend, MongoDB, New Relic, Redis Labs and others. Partners have always constituted a core pillar Big Blue’s strategy, from the public cloud all the way to the data center.

Hardware meets open source

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Standing out from the dozens of partners attending Impact is Xilinx, a San Jose-based maker of programmable hardware that is demonstrating what it hails as the industry’s first value store acceleration engine to leverage IBM’s Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface, or CAPI for short. The technology, which is accessible through the company’s OpenPOWER Foundation, is a PCI-Express 3.0 overlay that can be used to connect Big Blue’s latest POWER8 processor with GPUs, ASICs and other specialized chips for increased performance.

Introduced just a few days ago, POWER8 is a sliver of silicon measuring one square inch that packs 4 embedded billion microscopic transistors and more than 11 miles of copper wiring. Besides sheer horsepower, the chip is also notable for the fact that IBM contributed the upstream specification to OpenPOWER  as part of its effort foster the development of third party solutions such as Xilinx’s software.

As Big Blue’s push to open source the data center gains momentum with ecosystem, Elecsys is pulling the discussion around open standards in a different direction with its new RediLink series of remote digital links.  The product family, unveiled in the same timeframe as the Internet of Things capabilities for BlueMix, makes it easier to collect large volumes of real-time machine data from field devices by automatically converting it into a format accessible via IP-based transport protocols used by modern enterprise host systems.

image via IBM