IBM unveiled new business process and integration software and services that will help organizations accelerate adoption of big data, cloud, mobile and social business technologies. At the cornerstone of this strategy is IBM MessageSight, a new appliance designed to help organizations manage and communicate with the billions of mobile devices and sensors found in systems such as automobiles, traffic management systems, smart buildings and household appliances.
IBM also says it is extending its Business Process Management (BPM) and Operational Decision Management (ODM) solutions to integrate with its IBM MobileFirst portfolio. With access to these IBM MobileFirst capabilities, clients can now infuse their processes and operational decision making into custom mobile apps, accelerating the delivery of mobile BPM applications and tapping into location, camera and notification features.
“Mobile, social and cloud data are changing the IT landscape,” Marie Wieck, general manager of IBM's WebSphere unit, said at a briefing at IBM's recent Impact event. These converged forces are “driving an intelligent, interconnected and instrumented world that is smarter than ever before.” Of particular concern is the creation and management of mobile applications that connect with back-end enterprise systems, she says. “We have some customers doing 100 mobile apps updates a year. We want to help customer address some of the issues they may not have thought about. We need to rethink and re-look at what it takes to have smarter processes.”
IBM also said it is making both IBM BPM and IBM ODM solutions available on the IBM SmartCloud as a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering. These advances in cloud options for business processes complement a new release of IBM Blueworks Live, a SaaS-based cloud offering that enables clients to capture, document and understand the decisions that businesses use to run their operations.
IBM also announced a solution to help organizations securely create, manage and socialize APIs in an effort to extend their products and services to various mobile channels. Clients can also access a collaboration portal to view operational metrics and gain business insights into how apps are performing in the market.
The vendor also says its WebSphere Application Server (WAS) now supports several open standards protocols and integrates with the IBM MobileFirst platform and IBM MessageSight to help organizations quickly build and run new web applications that embrace big data, cloud, mobile and social business technologies.
Another new offering, IBM Integration Bus, provides access to IBM MobileFirst capabilities, which can extend critical data to mobile devices in real time to improve business operations.
IBM also says working with the OpenStack community to make its cloud services and software open source-based, and also support for the announced proposal to standardize Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) – the proposed protocol for “the internet of things.”
For more information, visit the IBM website.