OREANDA-NEWS. July 23, 2015. IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled a new platform for developers to collaborate with IBM on a newly released set of open source technologies. IBM will release 50 projects to the open source community to speed enterprise adoption and spur a new class of cloud innovations around mobile, analytics and other high-growth areas.

developerWorks Open is a cloud-based environment for developers to access emerging IBM technologies, technical expertise and collaborate with a global network to accelerate projects.  Developers can not only expect to download the code, but also have access to blogs, videos, tools and techniques to accelerate their efforts. The goal is to enable them to act with speed and have the confidence to build and deploy open source apps working with clients’ demanding business requirements.

The current model of development in the open source community lacks a strategic focus business requirements. To address this, IBM is launching a set of projects in industries including healthcare, mobile, retail, insurance and banking that meet that meet real-world business challenges.

Today's news represents the next step of IBM's commitment to the open source community. IBM has more than 20 years of leadership in the open source movement, and thousands developers certified to engage in open source development. IBM is bringing this initiative forward to remove the obstacles that inhibit developers from turning open source code into sustainable applications that solve real business issues.

Among the broad range of technologies already deployed on developerWorks Open, IBM is making available projects in key areas to help bridge the development gap. IBM will also offer these services on its programming platform for cloud software development, Bluemix.

For Instance, IBM is open sourcing a number of apps from its MobileFirst portfolio that will assist developers in the healthcare, retail insurance and banking mobile markets:

  • IBM Ready App for Healthcare that tracks patient progress for at-home physical therapy programs via mobile device.
  • IBM Ready App for Retail personalizes and reshapes the specialty retail store shopping experience through direct line of communication
  • IBM Ready App for Insurance improves the relationship between homeowners and insurers and uses Internet of Things sensors to synch home with utilities.
  • IBM Ready App for Banking helps financial institution's address the mobile needs business owners and attract prospects.

Additionally, IBM is open sourcing several Analytics technologies including:

  • Activity Streams which provides developers with a standard model and encoding format for describing how users engage with both the application and with one another.
  • Agentless System Crawler offer a unified cloud monitoring and analytics framework that enables visibility into all types of cloud platforms and runtimes
  • IBM Analytics for Apache Spark puts the full analytics power and capabilities of Spark at your fingertips. Beta now available on Bluemix.

IBM will also continue to open source cloud data services, including:

  • IBM Object Storage on Bluemix Service Broker which can be used to integrate OpenStack Swift with Cloud Foundry, allowing fast access to cloud data without needing to know where the data is stored

The creation of developerWorks Open comes at an important time for cloud developers. Organizations are wrestling with getting the most out of their multiple clouds environments. For instance, a developer building cloud applications on Bluemix, that requires storing videos and repair photos for an insurance accident claim application, may have difficulty making a choice and then implementing. developerWorks Open helps simplify that choice and provides the reassurance that this has industry support.

"IBM firmly believes that open source is the foundation of innovative application development in the cloud," IBM Vice President of Cloud Architecture and Technology Dr. Angel Diaz said. "With developerWorks Open, we are open sourcing additional IBM innovations that we feel have the potential to grow the community and ecosystem and eventually become established technologies.”

Currently, IBM participates in and contributes to more than 150 open source projects. These projects include Spark, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Open Contain Project, Node.js, CouchDb, Linux, Eclipse and an already established relationship with Apache. Open source projects increase the skills and knowledge base around IBM's software product set. developerWorks Open is the next step in IBM's strategy to help businesses create, use, and innovate around cloud computing systems.