Local Software Developers to benefit from IBM’s Bluemix platform

Local Software developers can now join a community of over 40,000 data scientists and cognitive developers around the world in building and marketing their apps using IBM Cloud in a faster, convenient and cost-effective manner.

This has been made possible through the IBM’s platform, Bluemix. The platform will help Software developers weave together services, infrastructure and data to rapidly bring ideas to production. The platform will also help developers through the process of building systems that use data to understand, reason, and learn.

IBM Bluemix is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) developed by IBM. It supports several programming languages and services as well as integrated DevOps to build, run, deploy and manage applications on the cloud. Bluemix is based on Cloud Foundry open technology and runs on SoftLayer infrastructure.

Speaking during the IBM for Developers forum in Nairobi, Innovation Centre Leader at IBM East Africa Silas Macharia said the firm offers IBM Cloud Market place that leverages on global exposure to potential clients, sellers and an extensive developer community as measured by millions of users each month.

“Bluemix is a vibrant platform that enables developers to reach enterprise buyers, capture the attention of both business and technical audiences and allows one to buy through the IBM Marketplace,” he said about the solution that was launched in June 2014.

Bluemix also enables developers to integrate into the backend of organizations giving more options for aps development for more user groups and is open standard to mean that one does not need to learn a new language.

“At IBM, we believe in the power of open source software and standards to accelerate development and empower developers. This allows for an extensive innovation capabilities by the developers without any limitations,” Macharia said.

Macharia also pointed out that Bluemix offered developers the opportunity to design and build their first chatbot through the complex enterprise systems.

“IBM is committed to prioritizing and contributing to open technologies to enable anyone to help define the cognitive era,” he said.

On his part, Andela Country Director for Kenya Joshua Mwaniki said the world was embracing Brick and Mortar from the traditional physical presence of an organization or business in a building thus making software development critical in solving complex problems for both individuals and companies.

The event hosted 40 developers from Andela, hailing from both Kenya and Uganda. Andela is a global organization that extends engineering teams with world class software developers.

“IBM Bluemix defines software development revolution and fundamentally changes the way we interact with technology. But most importantly we believe this platform will enable our developers to be more innovative in designing and building apps that solve our daily problems,” he said.

He said that since most people spent about six to eight hours daily in front of computers, it was essential to invest in tomorrow’s leaders given that there will be over one million software development jobs created in the next decade with fewer domestic computer science graduates to fill them.

IBM Cloud solutions offer free one-month trial after which you pay per use of the service of the APP your utilizing; this can be charged on per click basis or on storage capacity. Within the consumption there is a free tier on most IBM services, once consumed you pay on usage.

Service can be as low as Kshs 51 (US$0.5) for 1000 API calls. Additionally, IBM Offers the following options for cloud services namely Pay as You Go; Subscription model (discounted model); dedicated annual contract and the local annual contract.

IBM Cloud (Bluemix) ensures security readiness by adhering to security policies that are driven by best practices in IBM for systems, networking, and secure engineering. These policies include practices such as source code scanning, dynamic scanning, threat modeling, and penetration testing. Bluemix follows the IBM Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) process for security incident management.

IBM will therefore continue to contribute code and sponsor developer initiatives and open source communities to advance most compelling technologies.