IBM announced a new platform for developers to collaborate with IBM on a newly released set of open source technologies. These consist of 50 projects focusing on cloud innovations around mobile, analytics and other high-growth areas.
"IBM firmly believes that open source is the foundation of innovative application development in the cloud," said Dr. Angel Diaz, vice president of cloud architecture and technology for IBM. "With developerWorks Open, we are open sourcing additional IBM innovations that we feel have the potential to grow community and ecosystem and eventually become established technologies.”
developerWorks Open is a cloud-based environment for developers to access emerging IBM technologies, technical expertise and collaborate with a global network to accelerate projects. Developers can not only expect to download the code, but also have access to blogs, videos, tools and techniques to accelerate their efforts. The goal is to enable them to act with speed and have the confidence to build and deploy open source apps working with clients’ demanding business requirements.
The current model of development in the open source community lacks a strategic focus business requirements. To address this, IBM is launching a set of projects in industries including healthcare, mobile, retail, insurance and banking that meet that meet real-world business challenges.
Among a series of technologies already deployed on developerWorks Open, IBM is making available projects in key areas to help bridge the development gap. IBM will also offer these services on its programming platform for cloud software development, Bluemix.
For instance, IBM is open-sourcing a number of apps from its MobileFirst portfolio that will assist developers in the healthcare, retail insurance and SMB mobile markets, including IBM Ready App for Healthcare, which tracks patient progress for at-home physical therapy programs via mobile device, and IBM Ready App for Retail, which is intended to personalize and reshape the specialty retail store shopping experience through direct line of communication
IBM will also continue to open source cloud data services, including IBM Object Storage on Bluemix Service Broker, which can be used to integrate OpenStack Swift with Cloud Foundry, enabling fast access to cloud data without needing to know where the data is stored.
Currently, IBM participates in and contributes to more than 150 open source projects. These projects include Spark, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Open Contain Project, Node.js, CouchDB, Linux, Eclipse and an already established relationship with Apache.
For more information, go to www.developer.ibm.com/open.