infoTECH Feature

July 22, 2015

IBM Expands Open Source Initiatives

Fresh off the heels of its earnings announcement yesterday, IBM today announced the next step in its long-standing commitment to the open source community.

That involves the unveiling of a new open source developer platform called developerWorks Open. The platform provides developers with access to blogs, code, tools, and video to expedite their work as well as enterprise adoption of cloud-based analytics, mobile, and other high-growth area applications.

IBM (News - Alert) also plans to release 50 projects to the open source community. That will include projects focusing on a variety of industry verticals such as banking, health care, insurance, and retail. Big Blue also will open source an array of its Mobile First apps, including the IBM Ready Apps for Banking, Healthcare, Insurance, and Retail.

The company will also open source analytics technology and cloud data services. That will include Activity Stream, Agentless System Crawler, and IBM Analytics for Apache Spark on the analytics front, and IBM Object Storage on Bluemix Service Broker on the cloud side.

Speaking of the cloud, IBM today also announced a new initiative through which it will partner with 200 universities around the world to train students to become cloud developers. The program is called Academic Initiative for the Cloud and will begin this fall with 250 classes that will leverage IBM materials and technologies, with a focus on the company’s Bluemix solutions.

Bluemix enables developers to use prominent open source compute technology to power apps and then this solution handles the rest. It supports app-centric run-time environments based on Cloud Foundry; leverages IBM containers for portable and consistent delivery of apps without the requirement of having to manage an OS; and allows for use of OpenStack-based virtual machines to allow for flexibility and control over environments.

Among the schools that will be involved are:

  • Ben-Gurion University (Israel);
  • Carnegie Mellon University;
  • Imperial College of Science (England);
  • International Institute of Information Technology (India); 
  • National College of Ireland;
  • National University of Singapore; 
  • Northwestern University;
  • University of California Irvine;
  • University of Cambridge;
  • University of Southern California; 
  • University of Stuttgart; and
  • University of Tokyo.



Edited by Dominick Sorrentino
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