IBM Opens its Cloud Marketplace and BlueMix Garage in SF's SOMA

IBM launched a new cloud marketplace that provides gateway for the company's extensive global business partner ecosystem to tap into the growing $250B cloud market opportunity.

Clients can access a full suite of IBM-as-a-Service with 100 SaaS applications, IBM's Bluemix platform-as-a-service with composable services, the powerful SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service and third party cloud services.

"Increasingly cloud users from business, IT and development across the enterprise are looking for easy access to a wide range of services to address new business models and shifting market conditions," said Robert LeBlanc, Senior Vice President, IBM Software & Cloud Solutions. "IBM Cloud marketplace puts Big Data and Analytics, mobile, social, commerce, integration ---- the full power of IBM-as-a-Service and our ecosystem --- at our clients' fingertips to help them quickly deliver innovative services to their constituents."

Initial third-party cloud providers in the marketplace include SendGrid, Zend, Redis Labs, Sonian, Flow Search Corp, Deep DB, M2Mi and Ustream.

In addition, IBM added 30 additional cloud services to BlueMix, its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to help developers quickly integrate applications and speed deployment of new cloud services.  Additionally, IBM is launching BlueMix Garages, collaborative locations where developers can create new apps on BlueMix, learn new development skills, and access IBM's developer ecosystem. The first such faclity is in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood.

IBM is leveraging BlueMix's foundation on SoftLayer. The goal is to combine  IBM's middleware software with third-party and open technologies to create an integrated development experience in the cloud.

http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/