IBM Creates Digital Cloud Experience

Looking to help build applications on top of a Web content management framework in the cloud, IBM announced this week it has partnered with Portico Consultancy to create IBM Digital Experience on Cloud.

Tony Higham, director of Digital Experience on Cloud and IBM Distinguished Engineer, said making use of the IBM SoftLayer cloud to build and deploy Web applications should enable solution providers to cost effectively address opportunities that span everything from as few as ten to theoretically millions of users.

Using, for example, JavaScript tools and REST application programming interfaces (APIs) Higham said the Digital Experience on Cloud platform enables solution providers to take advantage of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application platform that is easily extensible.

The end goal, said Higham, is to not only reduce the time it takes to bring these applications to market, but also make it easier for solution providers to partner with one another across an expanding cloud ecosystem. At this point, Higham said IBM has about 700 partners with web content management expertise. Initially, Higham said IBM is looking for about 10 percent of those partners to build applications that would be hosted on the IBM SoftLayer cloud.

Many of those applications, said Higham, are simply ones that previously would never have been built because of the costs associated with building them on premise or in another cloud are simply too high. By working with Portico, however, Higham said it’s now more economically feasible to build new classes of applications because both the Web content and application development platform, along with associated infrastructure, are all now made available as a cloud service.

Higham said that from an IBM Partner perspective the IBM Digital Experience on Cloud should enable them to go deeper into vertical industries by creating, a much broader portfolio of applications. Because it also costs less now to develop those applications Higham also said that business partners should feel free experiment more because the cost of failure on a cloud platform is considerably less than developing applications in an on premise environment that require organizations to allocate dedicated infrastructure to any given project. Finally, Higham noted that because the project itself is hosted in the cloud it becomes much easier for partners to reuse components across multiple customer engagements.

For all the talk of the power of cloud computing it may not be massive enterprise class applications that have the most profound impact. Instead, it may very well turn out that the collective weight of hundreds of thousands of custom applications tailored to address one or two specific needs will more than likely provide more value to the business than any massive packaged application environment ever could. Only time, of course, will tell if that’s how things play out in the end. But if IT history is any guide, the more custom an application is the more generally appreciated it is by the business.