CC image courtesy of Patrick H~ on Flickr
IBM has announced its BlueMix cloud-based service allows app developers to roll out their apps more quickly.
Chidebele Ifediora, software IT architect at IBM West Africa, told HumanIPO on the sidelines of the Tech4Africa conference in Lagos the platform takes care of the burdens of infrastructure and management for emerging developers and companies.
“The burden of infrastructure is already taken care of in addition to that of management. Apps can be rolled out in time and developers can focus on pure app functionality,” he said.
He said BlueMix is not proprietary to IBM and is available to users based on open standards.
“Compared with others, BlueMix is leveraging on open standard and it offers support for third party app,” Ifediora said.
For corporate organisations, he said they can make use of the platform to remain competitive by quickly providing their customers with additional services.
“Let’s look at apps that offer SMS features for instance. If your competitor is offering SMS and you are not, you may lose customers to them. But on BlueMix, you will only develop the non-SMS aspect and plug it in BlueMix service,” he said.
He said the platform makes it possible to scale on demand.
“Increased traffic requires increased infrastructure which could be complex and error-laden. BlueMix could help with that,” he said.
For developers, he said there are huge benefits, while for organisations BlueMix can allow them to cope with increased pressure and competition.
“BlueMix is dynamic and flexible; it supports multi-language. It was officially released at the end of June and we are sensitising the tech community in Nigeria about it. Concerning pricing, there is currently a free trial period and the pricing model will be announced as soon as it is available,” Ifediora said.
