News

IBM Expands Services for Mobile App Development

• By David Ramel
• April 29, 2014

IBM today announced an expansion of its MobileFirst application development portfolio and new pre-configured mobile apps for certain vertical industries.

The MobileFirst portfolio includes a set of tools to help companies develop, deploy and manage mobile apps, whether on-premises or hosted in a cloud service.

For on-premises development, IBM offers the Worklight application development platform, as reported earlier here. For the cloud, the mobile development portfolio includes BlueMix, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering designed to help developers quickly integrate apps and deploy cloud services. Yesterday, IBM announced 30 new services for BlueMix, targeting cloud integration, the Internet of Things (IoT), and data and analytics, among many others.

"Both IBM Worklight and BlueMix offer mobile quality assurance capabilities to help developers track user experiences and provide sentiment analysis, crowd-sourced feedback submissions, and in-context crash reports that identify problems for rapid resolution," IBM said in a news release.

IBM claimed Worklight can cut mobile development costs by 60 percent, citing a case study featuring the German computer services company Rohde & Schwarz, which saw the savings in multiplatform projects targeting five platforms.

In what the company calls its MobileFirst business acceleration portfolio, IBM announced new Ready Apps, pre-configured apps for industry-specific scenarios such as banking, retail, health care, insurance, travel and transportation, government, and connected devices. For example, a Ready App for Industrial, Connected Home lets users control house devices such as thermostats, lights and alarm systems, along with measuring energy use by device or by all devices aggregated.

"The new offerings will help developers from enterprise and born-on-the-Web companies quickly design, deliver and deploy secure mobile apps -- helping to prevent data leaks and vulnerabilities -- with the same speed and simplicity that consumers have come to expect, at enterprise scale," IBM said.