IBM Wants To Be Your Cloud Moving Company

"We're entering the second wave of cloud adoption," said John Rymer, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. "It's here to stay. The move is on."

Rymer, who spoke this week at IBM's Relay 2015, debuted new Forrester research around the growth of "customer-centric" workloads and the rise of private enterprise clouds. According to Forrester's recent survey of 200 global IT decision makers (conducted on behalf of IBM), 38 percent of organizations have deployed systems of record (SOR) or systems of insight (SOI)—meaning data storage systems and the business intelligence tools used to analyze that data—in public clouds.

According to Forrester, an average of 88 percent of those organizations plan to increase the number of applications and systems in which they build or migrate to cloud platforms over the next two years, with customer-focused technology such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems and asset management services as the key drivers.

Rymer explained that because the cloud eliminated so many deployment issues (essentially letting companies create an account and start working right away at a low cost), it became the preferred environment very quickly. More than implementation, the trick now is managing that enterprise-scale cloud. "Customer-focused technology is all about speed; continuous integration and improvement," said Rymer.

"When you are applying technology to win, serve, and retain customers, you are also in a tussle with them. Customers have immediate access to all kinds of insight that puts them in a very powerful position relative to you. They move very quickly and tastes change on a dime. You need to constantly be producing better insights, better apps, and new campaigns. Technology and products aren't the problem. Culture, organizational structure, and managing that platform are now the biggest limitations."

IBM aims to facilitate that culture change and cloud migration for businesses, and then help companies manage the hybrid cloud architecture once it's there. In his opening keynote, Steve Robinson, General Manager of the IBM Cloud Platform, called IBM's Bluemix suite of cloud app development services "an enterprise-grade innovation platform" in a world where hybrid cloud applications are increasingly becoming the norm for integrated digital businesses.

Through Bluemix and the Bluemix Garage innovation centers in start-up ecosystems around the world, IBM is designing an infrastructure and support system to hold companies' collective hands as they shift and strike a flexible, scalable balance between different cloud deployment models.

"Businesses will ask us, 'How do I do public cloud that keeps some of the enterprise attributes around it?' Bluemix can create a dedicated environment to carve out a virtualized space for a single client," said Robinson.

Robinson said businesses also ask, "How do I connect the old with the new and do two-speed IT? How do I set up a secure connection from my mainframe to my cloud application? How about a tool that lets me mix my records with open data sets without jeopardizing the private data of my clients?" Bluemix Local brings cloud attributes back behind the firewall, according to Robinson.

Inside IBM Bluemix Garage and Lab Services

Last week, IBM announced two new Bluemix services—Active Deploy and Event Hub—to automatically push software updates to cloud systems and to group multiple data streams together. Both play into IBM's role in facilitating a company's painless transition to the cloud. The services also comprise parts of Relay, IBM's mechanism for connecting to cloud systems for pushing upgrades and monitoring applications across public, private, and hybrid clouds as well as middleware, mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

If Bluemix is the enabling technology in business cloud transitions, then Bluemix Garage represents the cultural aspect. Bluemix Garage is a start-up within IBM that was founded in April 2014. There are currently Garages in San Francisco, London, and Toronto, and the company has plans to launch new locations in Nice, France and Melbourne, Australia. IBM also offers Bluemix Garage services online. These innovation labs work with businesses on getting their first cloud applications up and running—from brainstorming and piloting the idea to scaling it up.

Damion Heredia, Vice President of Product Management and Design for IBM Bluemix and Marketplace, told PCMag the team has been breaking down the data services in IBM's Watson platform and incorporating them into Bluemix. IBM has added 30 machine learning, image and text recognition, and other cognitive and data tooling services over the past two months to analyze what Heredia called the "dark data" that traditional self-service tools can't unlock. "Business leaders are getting the sort of insights they couldn't get before, that they can then plug into their app and gain value from on their own," said Heredia.

"In the Garage, from a business standpoint, you're so much more involved in the development experience. We teach what we call Design Thinking upfront, which brings the business users into the development at the table. We require it. There's no more talking to developers only."

The Garages function as grassroots outposts for hybrid cloud technology, melding Bluemix technology with cloud development experts, in a casual office setting. Heredia said when it comes to moving your business to a cloud environment (whether it's public, private, or hybrid), the size of the organization matters far less than the willingness to embrace the culture shift the cloud brings with it. "It's about selling an experience and the cultural change that goes with cloud adoption," said Heredia.

"We have a ton of start-ups on our platform, whether it's gaming companies that want worldwide data replication at the lowest cost, to start-ups we're bringing through our Garages, to the Watson ecosystem bringing thousands of start-ups together using Watson services to build better apps. As long as they have the same goal in mind—developing faster, spending less on operations, and getting more people involved in building apps while maintaining safety and performance—it doesn't matter if they're a three-person start-up, a small innovation team, or a thousand-employee IT arm of a pharmaceutical corporation. They all need a platform to engage in, with API services to stitch it all together."