IBM intros cloud development, test services

NEW YORK, US: IBM today announced that it has introduced products for software development  and test, which are  included in its set of commercial “cloud” services portfolio, 'Smart Business'. This will give clients a reliable way to standardize IT functions that are rapidly becoming too costly or difficult to use, said a press release.

As a part of its cloud portfolio, IBM would offer clients three choices to deploy development and test cloud services:

Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud– IBM software delivery services for the cloud, enabling organizations to free up resources to gain rapid returns on their software investments by levering IBM’s secure, scalable cloud delivery model for application lifecycle management.

IBM Smart Business Test Cloud – Private cloud services, behind the client’s firewall, built and/or run by IBM.

IBM CloudBurst- a family of pre-integrated hardware, storage, virtualization and networking, with a sophisticated service management system built-in.

In many organizations software developers are fast becoming the nucleus of innovation, crucial to all business processes, said a press release.

It further added that they build the services and capabilities that would  underlie future revenue and generate opportunity.

In fact, developers are driving so much business value that the average enterprise devotes 30 to 50 per cent of its entire technology infrastructure to development and test, but typically up to 90 per cent of it remains idle.

In addition to high cost and low utilization rates, today software developers lose a massive amount of time and productivity getting permissions and access to the systems and tools they need to do their jobs.

IBM has seen that safely enabling developers to serve themselves can help reduce IT labor costs by 50 per cent, reduce provision cycle times from weeks to minutes and improve quality, eliminating software defects by up to 30 per cent, added the release.

Erich Clementi, general manager, enterprise initiatives, IBM, said,  “Today’s Smart Business announcement demonstrates that we take this responsibility seriously with cloud investment and solutions targeting the early opportunity. We are responding today as we did assisting enterprises with the shift to e-business and in the embrace of open source and Linux.”  

Based on nearly two years of research and hundreds of client engagements, the IBM Smart Business cloud portfolio is meant to help clients turn complex business processes into simple services.

To accomplish this, Smart Business brings sophisticated automation technology and self-service to specific digital tasks as diverse as software development and testing; desktop and device management; and collaboration, added the release.