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Like IBM Bluemix? Need Private Infrastructure? IBM Comes To The Party

This article is more than 9 years old.

Update - it was pointed out to me that my article inferred that Bluemix Dedicated is an on-premises offering. It is in fact an isolated SoftLayer instance managed by IBM. As such it is private, but not on-premises. My perspective is that, for the use case being discussed here in any case, private and on-premises deliver the same customer need. Hence the two, for this topic alone, can be seen as one and the same.

We’ve been hearing for a few years that developers are the new powerbrokers within enterprises. As every enterprise looks to use software to differentiate what they do, vendors are looking to make it easier for developers to create, manage and iterate software. But many organizations need to retain their infrastructure in-house. IBM is delivering upon this dual need today with the announcement of Bluemix Dedicated.

IBM Bluemix is Big Blue’s developer platform, it leverages the Cloud Foundry open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) but served up with a healthy dose of IBM enterprise readiness. Of course many would argue that the IBM value-add is somewhat illusory but for conservative organizations, that old adage that “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” still holds true. But many organizations, and especially the more conservative IBM customers, have either a perceived or an actual need to keep their infrastructure remaining private to them. Whether it is because of the regulated industry they work in, their particular geographic location or the nature of the work load, private infrastructure is a non-negotiable requirement for many enterprises.

Which is why IBM is launching a dedicated version of Bluemix in private cloud environments. The solution allows developers to connect and build with their organization's data in the cloud, but within a private infrastructure construct.

The dedicated version of Bluemix takes a number of different services and packages them up. Included is:

  • Cloudant’s scalable Database-as-a-Service
  • Data caching to improve the speed and responsiveness of web apps
  • MQ Light’s messaging service to help build, run and scale cloud apps
  • Runtimes to give developers the flexibility to run their apps in the coding language of their choice

Developers can build apps in Bluemix Dedicated, as well as pull in services from IBM’s public Bluemix catalog, which has tools such as Watson APIs for cognitive computing, social data analytics and Aspera’s data integration tools. They can also take advantage of IBM growing public cloud presence to segregate data which needs to be privately stored, from that which can be stored in the public cloud.

Alongside Bluemix Dedicated, IBM is also introducing a new Private API catalog on its public version of Bluemix, allowing enterprise developers to access on-premise data and services as their organizations experiment with building and moving different pieces of their business to the cloud. The APIs leverage a secure connection between an organization’s back-end, sensitive data and either public or Bluemix Dedicated; turning internal data into consumable services on which internal developers and third parties can build.

IBM is often dismissed as a slow lumbering beast in comparison with its newer public cloud competitors. But while vendors sit on a continuum, so to do customers. And for many customers on the more conservative end of the spectrum, IBM’s solutions still carry a level of credibility and trust that they demand. For these customers, Bluemix Dedicated is a logical offering. The question is just how big is the intersection between organizations that want to use an agile developer platform in one circle, and organizations that have stringent requirements around data location in the other – IBM is surely hoping that Venn diagram has a significant intersect.

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