IBM Reveals New Hybrid Cloud Technology and Investments 

Today, IBM announced new hybrid cloud technology and investments that will tackle the biggest challenges enterprises face as they adopt cloud and integrate existing applications, data and services across a multitude of traditional systems and clouds.

IBM is delivering a series of technologies and services that will extend clients’ control, visibility, security and governance in a hybrid cloud environment similar to what clients have in their private cloud and traditional IT systems. In doing so, IBM will provide increased data portability across environments and make it dramatically easier for developers to work across cloud and non-cloud environments.

IBM is dedicating the talents of more than half its cloud development team to hybrid cloud innovations, including hundreds of developers working on open cloud standards.  More than 65 percent of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud technologies before 2016, vastly driving the rate and pace of change in IT organizations.

Digitization is accelerating the ongoing evolution of business. Clouds - public, private, and hybrid - enable companies to extend their existing infrastructure and integrate across systems. IBM Cloud provides the security, control and visibility they have come to expect and provides the flexibility to run critical applications and processes in an environment that mirrors existing controls. Through the SoftLayer infrastructure combined with the new services IBM is announcing, clients with now have the right tools and environment to combine all of their data no matter where it resides to respond to changing market dynamics.

According to IDC, 80 percent of new cloud applications are predicted to be big-data intensive  and much of it born on the cloud [2], brought on by the convergence of mobile applications, e-commerce transactions and other Web applications, companies are struggling to gain value in the data being generated in today's digital revolution. As a result, businesses are increasingly struggling with incorporating, managing and gaining insights into processes and data.

"Today, we are launching a new class of hybrid cloud innovations that extend open standards capabilities for the enterprise. This will help break down the barriers between clouds and on premise IT systems, providing clients with control, visibility and security as they utilize the public and private clouds,” said Robert LeBlanc, Senior Vice President, IBM Cloud. "Data location across an ever growing number of clouds is an increasing concern for customers and we are unveiling new portability and developer services to make this easier to manage.”

By surfacing the following services via composable API-based services in Bluemix, IBM is helping create a hybrid cloud environment that provides clients with the tools they require to extend their business to the cloud.

Bringing Portability to Enterprise Applications 

New portability services and open standards to easily move enterprise workloads across environments to bring the app closer to the data or the data closer to the app, including:

IBM Enterprise Containers: Help developers rapidly build and deliver applications by extending native Linux containers with Docker APIs to provide enterprise –class visibility, control and security as well as an added level of automation. Solutions developed in a cloud environment could be brought to on-premises systems for execution, allowing many of the benefits of cloud computing to be realized for data that cannot be moved to cloud for processing for reasons of data sensitivity, size, or performance.

Control, Visibility & Security

New services that extend clients’ traditional environment to the public cloud, including:

IBM DataWorks: New, intuitive tooling and experience to find, refine, enrich and deliver trusted data. This allows developers to subdivide and manipulate data sets from the treasure trove of public and private data.

Collaborative Operations: Enhanced visibility and control of clients’ hybrid environments with a single, end-to-end view.

Orchestration: Available as a service enabling management across hybrid environments that is the largest federated orchestration library in the industry.

Security: New features that protect the most vital data and applications using analytics across the enterprise, public and private clouds and mobile devices.

Increasing Developer Productivity 

New services that enable developers to more quickly, effectively, and securely connect apps, data and services across an open and flexible environment of traditional systems, cloud platforms and any device, seamlessly weaving data and services with APIs to compose new apps and services, including:

Secure Passport Gateway: Allows self-service to developers to securely connect data and services to Bluemix in minutes through a simple Passport service that keeps IT in control.

API Harmony: Find a perfect API match for a client’s application using the world’s largest knowledge base of APIs; easily expose and manage APIs.

Bluemix Local: Extends Bluemix into a company’s data center with borderless visibility and management across Bluemix environments (public, dedicated, and local)

IBM unveiled the Watson Zone, a new resource center on Bluemix that brings together Watson APIs, sample code, training resources and use cases to help inspire and guide users to build a new class of hybrid cloud applications infused with cognitive computing capabilities.

IBM also announced the general availability of the Watson Personality Insights service, which allows developers to integrate new capabilities to analyze trends and patterns in diverse, high volume social media and other public data streams. The commercial launch follows the addition of five new betas Watson services to Bluemix including Speech to Text, Text to Speech, Visual Recognition, Concept Insights and Tradeoff Analytics. These services are available free of charge to help developers explore potential use cases.

To make much of this possible, many of these new services rely on open technologies. As a top contributor to a number of open foundations including Cloud Foundry and OpenStack, IBM has dedicated hundreds developers to advancing open technologies for the hybrid cloud market. This has led to using OpenStack services to provide companies with the means to deploy and manage cloud workloads, package them in Linux based Docker containers that ensure an open, extensible approach to portability.