IBM has taken its MobileFirst development platform to the cloud.

The toolset, which was previously available only on premise, can now be provisioned quickly in the IBM Bluemix cloud. IBM is positioning the offering as a mix-and-match option, with customers having the choice of where to develop and deploy their applications without compatibility concerns. “We see this release as being the fusion of the infrastructure that enterprises need for safe, secure application development with speed and married with cloud,” said Michael Gilfix, vice president of IBM MobileFirst and Smarter Process.

Gartner estimates that 75 percent of enterprises will have a mobile development platform by 2020. A recent IBM Institute for Business Value study found that 77 percent of executives plan to do at least five enterprise mobile initiatives over the next year

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile App Development Platforms

Mobile application development has been one of the fastest-growing businesses within IBM, Gilfix said. That growth has been helped along by Gartner Inc.’s recent ranking of IBM as the leader in the research firm’s Magic Quadrant for mobile application development. IBM says it employs 6,000 mobile experts and has been granted more than 4,300 patents in mobile, social and security. MobileFirst is principally aimed at enterprises, but availability in the Bluemix cloud makes it accessible to anyone.

IBM is also beefing up security and adding options that enable developers to update their software automatically, in the same way that mobile app updates are pushed to users’ devices without their initiative. Users can now enable automatic updates by changing app functionality through configuration instead of code, IBM said.

“We’ve seen a lot of organizations struggle to keep up with the application backlog,” Gilfix said. “Users expect updates to come frequently, as they do on their phone.”

Security has been improved with a built-in framework that helps protect against mobile-specific threats by securing data on the device as well as helping to protect corporate APIs from hackers and vulnerabilities. An algorithm can be set to fingerprint applications to determine on startup if they have been tampered with. Encryption is now enabled from client to server and additional authentication levels can be triggered when a user attempts to access certain data or functionality within an app.

New analytics capabilities can gather real-time data on relevant app usage metrics and enable customers to crate custom business metrics based on in-app usage events. Developers and administrators can thus discover and troubleshoot issues at the point of interaction, IBM said.

The foundation also supports multi-channel API creation and management. IBM API Connect adds automated, visual and coding options for creating Node.js and Java microservice APIs.

IBM Mobile Foundation is priced at $5,000 for a single mobile application in production with unlimited mobile users on the Bluemix cloud.

Image courtesy IBM