At it’s annual customer conference here in Las Vegas, IBM emphazied the importance of ‘putting mobile first’ in new projects – instead of simply exposting backend data services to mobile apps - which Big Blue claims has vast implications for business process implementation, user interaction patterns, and data analytics.
IBM unveiled a number of new enhancements to its “MobileFirst” portfolio of products – first announced in February -- which now includes data analytics support, mobile cloud services, and cross-platform testing capabilities.
“Bringing together Big Data, Mobile, Cloud, Social and Internet of things is helping companies reinvent their business strategies, especially in traditional industries,” said Marie Wieck, IBM General Manager for WebSphere.
Built atop of JMS and MQTT, the new IBM MessageInsight appliance is specifically designed to capture and analyze information from “the internet of things” - mobile devices, sensors, automobiles, and household appliances - while handling a new scale of volume introduced by Big Data. According to IBM, MessageInsight is capable of supporting one million concurrent sensors and can scale up to thirteen million messages per second.
Building on it’s 2012 acquisition of mobile software vendor Worklight, IBM also unveiled V6 of the product this week, which now integrates mobile analytics from Tealeaf, a system for recording and playing back how users are interacting with a mobile application in real-time.
By being able to track user interaction behaviour from customers - gesture movements, mobile sensor activity, battery life, and more – companies can better serve their customers through contextual alerts based on a user’s location, for instance, said Wieck.
Other enhancements in Worklight V6 include support for cross-platfrm mobile testing using IBM Rational and faster deployment of mobile apps using UrbanCode’s devops capabilities. UrbanCode was acquired by IBM this month.
On the mobile development side, IBM also unveiled it’s Mobile Cloud Services offering which provides new opportunities for developers to leverage GPS, location based services, and commerce capabilities like PassBook with the goal of improving user interactions on mobile devices.
Related Updates to Core Portfolio of Products
While the mobile ecosystem drove many of this year's new product enhancements, IBM also announced a number of related updates to its portfolio of middleware products:
IBM API Management v2.0 – A new offering which provides a way for companies to create, expose, and manage core business APIs to various mobile channels. Includes a collaboration portal to view operational metrics and gain application performance insights.
IBM WebSphere Application Server v 8.5.5 – With a specific focus on enhancing performance, scalability, and handling new interactions with JavaScript, MongoDB, Node.JS.
IBM Integration Bus v9 - Delivers key enhancements that enable greater visibility and insight of data as it flows through the bus, facilitating more intelligent data processing and operational management of an integration solution.