IBM Partners with VMWare to Boost Cloud Offering for Enterprises

“The strategic partnership between IBM and VMware will enable clients to easily embrace the cloud while preserving their existing investments and creating new business opportunities”. “Everybody wants to innovate and it’s about speed, but no one is handing out blank checks”, said Gunther. That will smooth the way for old-school enterprises, which don’t traditionally work with Swift, to create apps for the iPhone and other widely used Apple devices. To allow for this strategic transformation, IBM’s software is now available on the cloud via public, private or on-premises delivery models.

After launching a sandbox playground for the newly open sourced Swift programming language last December, IBM today announced a runtime preview as the next step in its effort to advance server-side development with Apple’s new dev darling. Delivered as an easy to consume cloud service, developers can connect applications and data sources together, no matter where they reside. Further, a report from IDC states that over 80% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017. IBM claims to be the first cloud provider to enable the development of both cloud-native and server-based applications in Swift, which Croll said is now the number one open-source language on Github.

As revenue declines overall at IBM, in part due to customers turning to cheaper technology such as cloud-based services, it has looked for business in new areas, including trying to harness the cloud for its own growth. With more than 200 million global instances, WebSphere boasts the largest population of Java developers of any platform, IBM says. Additionally, it helps enable the automated creation of APIs, simplified discovery of systems of records, self-service access for internal and third party developers and built-in security and governance.

Instigating cloud warfare at its annual IBM InterConnect Conference in Las Vegas, the tech giant hopes the deal will boost the company’s cloud credentials in a market dominated by AWS, and backed up by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. For IBM, OpenWhisk is a new event-driven platform to allow developers to simplify app development. The partnership will meld IBM’s Watson Internet of things analytics with Siemens connected building technologies.

LeBlanc also said IBM is committed to bringing end-to-end live-streamed and on-demand video services to the market through a combination of several recent acquisitions, including Clearleap Inc.

What IBM Cloud now provides enterprise app developers with is a set of tools for writing software in Swift that’s meant to run on servers, rather than smartphones.

This is good because IBM investors and executives alike are betting on the cloud to turn Big Blue around amid shrinking top line revenues.

He added that their customers will be able to deploy their software-defined solutions efficiently and securely with sophisticated workload automation to take advantage of the flexibility and cost effectiveness of IBM Cloud. VMware will be integrated with IBM’s 45 cloud centers around the world. The two parties will co-market to joint customers.