Expanding its efforts to gain more enterprise support for its cloud services, IBM is releasing a single-tenant version of its Bluemix software for developers wary of working with the platform-as-a-service software on public servers.
Bluemix leverages IBM's Cloud Foundry PaaS to equip developers with the tools needed to quickly develop and release cloud applications, lowering the cost to do so by subsidizing the service through several payment plans.
The dedicated version of Bluemix allows the platform to be deployed over SoftLayer data centers on which the organization is the only client. The single-tenant version of Bluemix helps developers move beyond their organization's worries over compliance and security vulnerabilities.
Bluemix also allows organizations to tap into another part of IBM's strategy to gain a foothold in the cloud: Watson, its Jeopardy-winning supercomputer. The single-tenant version of Bluemix allows businesses to process sensitive information with Watson analytics.
Along with ensuring Bluemix software resides in privacy, the single-tenant version also helps organizations avoid suffering from data issues caused by "noisy neighbors." In shared data centers, resource-hungry clients can hamper the performance of others.
"With Bluemix Dedicated now available in our global cloud center network, IBM is adding another on-ramp to the cloud for developers to move quickly and innovate, but do so in a model that maintains the necessary levels of security and control," says Steve Robinson, general manager of IBM Cloud Platform Services.
To encourage organizations to migrate to the cloud, or to at least to expand onto it, IBM accompanied the announcement with news of a new application programming interface that will help with the transition from on-premises data centers.
IBM's new Private API catalog will equip developers with tools to patch a secure connection to on-premises data centers and Bluemix applications. Businesses can keep their most sensitive information on campus, while using the Private API bridge to feed the Bluemix software with insights from home base.
IBM uses a retailer in an example of how Bluemix can leverage the Private API power interactions between the merchant and customer. Bluemix, on the SoftLayer server, would use the Private API to establish a secure connection with an on-campus database to gain insights on a customer. The SoftLayer site would use the insights to pass along a promotion to the consumer, without the individual's sensitive information ever moving farther than the single-tenant site.
