Platform for the world of tomorrow – How can startups build a better tomorrow with Bluemix

This article is sponsored by IBM Bluemix

The Cloud is where it’s all happening

The Cloud is the latest vehicle driven by startups to remain competitive in today’s fast-paced business environment. Quick and easy deployment of technology, increased output and productivity, and better flexibility to course correct – these are just a few of the features of Cloud computing that companies leverage to remain nimble and responsive in today’s dynamic world.

Bluemix is an implementation of IBM's Open Cloud Architecture based on Cloud Foundry, an open source Platform as a Service (PaaS). It provides access to a wide variety of services that can be incorporated into an application. While some of these services are delivered through Cloud Foundry, others are delivered from IBM and third party vendors. IBM’s Bluemix environment substitutes countless hours spent by developers in setting up, configuring, and troubleshooting with time spent rapidly innovating and reacting to never-ending requirement changes, as well as users’ demands for new features.

The beta version of Bluemix was announced in February 2014, and it was made generally available in June of the same year. Within a year of its launch, Bluemix has become a serious contender in the PaaS market in India.

Why Startups and Developers are opting for Bluemix

For Developers: Because Bluemix is based on Cloud Foundry, developers can tap into a growing ecosystem of runtime frameworks and services. In addition, Bluemix provides a dashboard to create, view, and manage applications and services as well as monitor the application's resource usage.

Bluemix allows developers not only have access to a broad range of services and runtimes, but they have the flexibility to bring their own. This goes beyond providing developers with the right tool for the right job, but provides developers with the ability to use the core technology that they know and love. 

BlueMix removes much of the infrastructure complexity and frees up the developer to get right down to the business of programming apps quickly by:

• Reducing time for application/infrastructure provisioning
• Allowing for flexible capacity (storage, as well as bandwidth and processing)
• Automating technical tasks (i.e., developers no longer need to manage the back-end infrastructure)
• Decreasing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
• Accelerating exploration of new workloads such as social, mobile, big data

IBM’s vast (75+ and counting) and integrated array of offerings allows developers to provision Bluemix in as little as 5 minutes and also helps them to frequently change or upgrade operating system features, as well as collaborate with other development teams on projects. In short, Bluemix helps business application developers concentrate on developing innovative, top-quality applications.

For start-ups: Bluemix is simpler to use than other offerings in the market and ease of use is naturally a big plus for young companies. It also has certain capabilities that its competitors lack. For instance, there’s just one login to access all services, as well as a set of tools that make it possible to quickly deploy a service, both of which are a definite plus.

Bluemix has gained popularity amongst a swathe of sectors in the Indian startup environment. Several startups who are Global Entrepreneur Program Partners are already working in Bluemix.

• Algo Engines is a wind turbine portfolio management and performance improvement solution. Also Engines uses the data generated by a turbine to help wind turbine owners/operators/investors increase turbine performance
• Ineosoft is developing a product on Bluemix to monitor the ambient environmental parameters of a manufacturing facility like temperature, humidity CO2 levels, noise level, aggregation of people at specific points, the consumable factors like power, water and LPG consumption

Bluemix has also found acceptance amongst colleges, such as the Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology (MIET). In collaboration with IBM, MIET has implemented a private cloud lab environment, including the IBM Bluemix platform, to deliver first-of-a- kind training capabilities among private technological institutions in India. This developer incubator provides students an unprecedented opportunity to work with leading edge tools.

What the future holds

Bluemix is getting tremendous response from the startup and developer communities due to its unique capabilities. Media sources indicate that Bluemix adds about 10,000 new users each month, with about a third of them originating from India. According to Karthik Padmanabhan, the lead for Bluemix in India and South East Asia, about a third of the users in India are startups, the rest being large system integrators and independent software providers.

“In India, and across the world, Bluemix is getting tremendous response from the startup and developer communities due to its unique capabilities. Based on open source, Bluemix helps startups get a single development and management experience across any combination of public, dedicated and local Bluemix instances. Even if clients have existing infrastructure setups or APIs, they can securely connect those to Bluemix for a hybrid solution. We are excited to support the innovative ideas of these startups and many more such organizations in the future,” said Vivek Malhotra, Director – Cloud, IBM India / South Asia.

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