During the IBM Impact 2014 event, the big blue company introduced an expansion of its IBM MobileFirst Application Development portfolio and Cloud Marketplace. Offerings which include new tools and resources to help organizations easily create, test, and deploy mobile and cloud applications. These new products complement IBM SmartCloud and IBM MobileFirst portfolios.

Cloud and mobile have grown considerably in the world of IT–PaaS vendor EngineYard predicts 1 billion smartphones in 2014, and with the cloud will the engine to drive that consumption. Cloud and mobile provide a constantly changing market with this growth, as cited by EngineYard over 1 billion Android apps are downloaded a month, and this will only increase as more apps are developed. As a result, businesses are required to provide and use mobility software and cloud more quickly and consistently than before.

The key to this change is DevOps. The goal of DevOps is to ensure continuous software deployment. This allows companies to take advantage of market opportunities faster and better meet customer requirements. The IBM DevOps portfolio helps companies to address the entire life cycle of software development that is independent of the developed application.

Cloud business transformation

The improvement of the development processes for cloud applications is important as organizations seek business through higher value opportunities with the help of big data analytics and cloud integration, as well as the Internet of Things.

With the acquisition of SoftLayer, IBM has made cloud hosting an anchor to build many of their PaaS and developer solutions on top of cloud-based functionality. During the event, IBM announced BlueMix Garage, a collaborative space for developers, startups and large companies to work side by side with IBM to rapidly develop innovative applications. The goal of BlueMix Garage is ​​to give developers a way to build cloud applications quickly whether they are with IBM, a third-party or open technologies.

Moreover, IBM announced 30 new services for BlueMix including the BlueMix DevOps Continuous Integration services and Cloud Integration service that intend to support agile approaches with a common software delivery approach regardless of the type of application being developed.

With these initiatives, IBM is building the strategy with development capabilities and provides tools to enable companies to deploy better applications faster and at lower cost. In addition to saving time, businesses can also save costs with deeper integration to back-end IBM services without requiring those systems to be in place.

Unlocking the value of development community

As part of ongoing efforts to support the global development community, IBM also unveiled the first cloud service marketplace for the enterprise, a single place on the IBM Cloud where customers can see all the SaaS, major infrastructure pieces and developers’ tools available on IBM SoftLayer.

The marketplace includes IBM’s Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), SoftLayer Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), IBM’s 100-plus SaaS services and other tools and aims to address customers a one-stop-shopping destination for cloud services. The marketplace will bring the full power of “IBM as a Service” and the entire ecosystem to the enterprises and developers and help them very quickly set up new services in areas such as analytics, mobile, integration or even marketing and e-commerce.

In addition to developers who see the Bluemix PaaS environment the necessary services and APIs for their tasks, IBM Cloud marketplace offers tools for big data and analytics requirements, disaster recovery, and managed security services or for the management of hybrid cloud environments.

Among the new enhanced services, IBM has released standardized, customizable IBM Ready Apps for customers in major verticals including a range of tools for developers to create, deploy and manage mobile apps, on-premise or in the cloud. One such tool is the new version of IBM Worklight that allows enterprises to support both native (via SDKs) and hybrid development models, as well as add new capabilities such as the USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) protocol for mobile money solutions in emerging markets. Combining with BlueMix, IBM Worklight tends to be a perfect place for developers to build applications and deploy into IBM SmartCloud using IBM Worklight technology.