IBM opens Bluemix Garage in NY, attracts cloud developers

Global technology and consulting corporation, IBM, has announced the opening of an IBM Bluemix Garage in New York City, which will help power the city’s growing concentration of developers, entrepreneurs, and fintech companies with cloud and blockchain. The company claims Bluemix Garage to be a consultancy with a startup DNA focused on empowering large and small companies, to design and build compelling applications for their target audience. New York City location joins IBM Bluemix Garage’s network present in Tokyo, San Francisco, London, Toronto, Nice, and Singapore. Citing a report from Evans Data Corp, IBM states that the global developer population is projected to reach 25 million by 2020 and this growing community is increasingly using Bluemix Garages to tap into IBM Cloud APIs around cognitive, Internet of Things, unstructured data, social media and more to swiftly build and launch innovations. Developers are also using these Garages to accelerate the exploration of blockchain projects, which can remove friction from financial transactions and prime blockchain to fundamentally change how markets function.

How will Garage help innovators

According to IBM, Bluemix Garages serves as a hub where developers, product managers and designers can come together to build on Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform. Located at 315 Hudson Street in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood, the newest Garage will help spur innovation through:

• Business Development: Combining enterprise expertise, agile methods, and IBM Design Thinking, unique process to design, build and deploy, Garage consultants help clients to refine, iterate on and deliver a business idea into an app.
• Hybrid Cloud Integration: Tapping IBM Cloud’s hybrid and open platform, Garage consultants help companies move existing data workloads to the cloud, lowering cost and adding enhancements, as well as connecting existing systems and data into new cloud apps.
• Speeding App Development: Through the Garage’s expertise in agility, extreme programming, DevOps and more, Garage consultants help businesses significantly reduce the time it takes to design and build new services, applications or products.
• Skills Development: Equipping development teams with the skills and expertise needed on Bluemix, Garage teams help businesses to rapidly scale cloud capabilities and implement agile development.

Fitting IBM Blockchain into the picture

A new study from IBM, describes how blockchain networks will eliminate stopgaps in the economy that are inhibiting business growth, propelling the movement of capital and exchange of value. According to IBM a number of obstacles such as participants of a transaction not having access to the same information, or the high price of intermediaries add costs and complexity that drags on global business and trade. With Blockchain technology, IBM claims to create a permanent and transparent record of transactions that will reduce or eliminate these stopgaps, recasting institutions and economy with far greater efficiency and less risk. Using the Blockchain technology Garages will be helping drive the next wave of financial services and fintech innovation, including new mobile banking and wealth management apps, and helping to pioneer the use of blockchain in multiple areas of finance, such as capital markets and commercial and retail banking. With IBM Bluemix Garage in Tokyo, Mizuho Financial Group recently announced a test of the potential of blockchain for use in settlements with virtual currency. By incorporating blockchain, Mizuho will explore how payments can be instantaneously swapped, potentially leading to new financial services based on this rapidly evolving technology. For these blockchain networks, Mizuho is using the open source Linux Foundation Hyperledger Project.