By Don Boulia, GM for Cloud Developer Services, IBM
Technical complexity and other roadblocks shouldn’t prevent organizations from using advanced cloud services. So IBM and Mendix, a leader in low-code platforms, are partnering to make sure they don’t.
According to IDC, cloud computing is now a substantial part of new IT spending and is expected to grow from $96.5 billion in 2016 to more than $195 billion by 2020, more than doubling in the next four years.
In 2017, 60 percent of the growth in IT spending was estimated to come from cloud computing alone. As cloud adoption grows, the need for moving applications to the cloud also increases, as well as the drive to connect more data workloads into the advanced tools that cloud offers to fuel AI.
However, many businesses face challenges when trying to embrace these new opportunities. They include:
- Lack of agility, as competitive and unique apps today require rapid experimentation and close collaboration among developers, data scientists, business analysts and IT teams.
- Technical complexity, which often causes teams to struggle to master the increasingly complex landscape of app development.
- Â A skills shortage. The demand for developers exceeds the supply. Many companies struggle to find the right skills when hiring, or cannot afford the increased resources required to keep up with demand.
Low code, a fast-growing category of app development, addresses these obstacles by bridging the gap between technology and business needs.
The collaboration between IBM and Mendix will combine the ease of Mendix’s low-code environment with the advanced services available on IBM Cloud, including AI, blockchain, data analytics, mobile and Internet of things (IoT) services. This significantly accelerates the speed at which developers from all backgrounds, from highly skilled coders to professionals expanding their roles, can build and deploy cloud-native innovation.
With Mendix on IBM Cloud, non-technical users can easily assemble software components and connect into datasets to build complex apps. The Mendix low-code development platform enables software creation through point-and-click interfaces instead of computer programming, reducing the amount of hand coding required to bring an app to production.
Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix, explained why this partnership is so important: “The apps of the future cannot be built with the tools of the past. Businesses across all industries are finding new ways to innovate, and today’s market leaders are putting low-code development at the core of their digital strategy. The partnership between IBM and Mendix enables customers to accelerate time to value and gain competitive advantage, leveraging IBM Cloud and IBM Watson services.”
The IBM and Mendix partnership presents a powerful combination of the IBM Cloud, which integrates public and private clouds and traditional data centers through a single architecture. Combining the data in these systems builds a foundation for AI workloads, and running the low-code platform of Mendix on top brings a single collaborative and simple user environment to business and technology teams.
Customers who use Mendix on IBM Cloud will benefit from:
- Accelerated time to value, delivering applications up to 10 times faster
- Â Native integration of IBM Watson IoT and AI services for low-code app building
- Cloud-native architecture supporting high availability and scalability
- Flexible cloud deployment across IBM Cloud options from public, to private and hybrid, including the option to deploy models such as Cloud Foundry or Docker/Kubernetes
- Increased collaboration and agility across business and technology teams
To get started, access the Mendix platform directly on top of IBM Cloud. There you will have the flexibility to consume rapid app building tools, cloud services and cloud runtimes under a single subscription.
Try it now and start innovating.
