IBM has expanded its Bluemix platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering with new analytics and data warehousing services as part of a bid to add more analytics offerings to cloud-based apps.

With the new services, IBM said developers will be able to integrate both data analytics and visualization capabilities into their applications.

The new IBM Cloud tools include the new Streaming Analytics service, available in beta, which is capable of scaling thousands of sources on the cloud. IBM says Streaming Analytics gives developers a more efficient way to visualize data, and will help expand the use of data analytics to a much broader base of users in the enterprise. One big advantage Streaming Analytics offers is its ability to scale, which means users can build out their infrastructure as needed, IBM said.

The other new service is IBM’s dashDB cloud data warehouse service, which is designed to make information management, analytics and business intelligence operations easier to perform in the cloud. According to IBM, its added massively parallel processing capabilities to the service for faster query processing, and to give it the ability to scale out as users require.

dashDB has also been made compatible with IBM Oracle, a data-warehouse appliance, and IBM Netezza, an analytics application. IBM said it did so to leverage dashDB’s parallel processing cluster architecture which makes it easy for users to connect with their existing databases. The service also integrates Netezza analytics libraries and is compatible with R, Cognos, IBM Watson Analytics and popular business intelligence tools like Tableau.

Bluemix was launched last year with $1 billion investment backing from IBM. The company claims the service is seeing new sign ups at a rate of 15,000 new users each week, and says its user based has almost doubled since last May. Most new signups are enterprise customers, though its seen growing interest from startups and academia as well. As a result, Bluemix is one of the largest deployments on Cloud Foundry, its cloud computing application platform.

The service is just one way in which IBM is trying to reinvent itself. The company aims to become a leader in PaaS as a way of boosting its overall hybrid, private and public cloud revenues. In its most recent earninsg report, IBM said its cloud revenues totalled $7.7 billion for the last 12 months.

Market watcher International Data Corp. (IDC) recently said that PaaS services like Bluemix are one of the main growth drivers in the cloud market. It forecasts that PaaS will be one of “the fastest growing categories, driven by major upticks in developer cloud services adoption and Big Data-driven solutions.”

In addition, IDC said that spending on public cloud IT services would reach $127 billion a year by 2018, when the market enters “a critical innovation stage” where we’ll see an “explosion” of cloud-based applications appear.

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