IBM is offering a Cloud Foundry based PaaS called Bluemix on SoftLayer's bare metal infrastructure. The service is integrated with other products including MQ Series, IBM Watson and Cloudant NoSQL.
A couple of years ago IBM joined Cloud Foundry Foundation with the goal to integrate its flagship products like WebSphere and MQ Series with the open source PaaS. After acquiring SoftLayer for building IaaS business, IBM announced Bluemix PaaS based on Cloud Foundry. This combination offered an integrated stack of cloud infrastructure and platform services.
To help enterprise developers expose on-premises data to the cloud-based applications, IBM announced a Private API catalog. This brings hybrid approach to building data-driven applications deployed on Bluemix PaaS. According to IBM, The Private API catalogue allows developers to build a secure connection between on-premise systems of record and IBM’s public Bluemix catalogue through an established dedicated tunnel; turning internal data into consumable services for internal developers and third parties to build applications on top of.
IBM Bluemix is now available in single-tenant mode running on dedicated bare metal infrastructure hosted in SoftLayer global data centers. Dubbed as Bluemix Dedicated, the bare metal PaaS is integrated with Cloudant's NoSQL, IBM Watson, a caching service and a variety of runtimes. IBM mentioned that Bluemix Dedicated helps clients address concerns over data sovereignty, performance and compliance by giving them more control over the physical location of their data and production environments – enabling them to build mission-critical apps locally and scale globally.
After launching Bluemix Garage, a PaaS focused startup accelerator in San Francisco, IBM is now partnering with Level39, Europe's largest technology accelerator based in London. With this IBM hopes to attract startups that will build the next generation mobile and web applications on Bluemix.
