Startup Cloud Boom

In 2015, the cloud was primarily used by large and mid-level organizations for mission-critical workloads, but this year it’s entrenching itself with startups and driving transformation. In India, currently boasting 2.75 million developers, and second only to the US’s 3.6 million developers, startups are reportedly adopting IBM Cloud to expand their businesses and develop applications with developer-friendly Bluemix and its catalog based on open standards, choice, and portability. Says Vivek Malhotra, director of IBM Cloud India/South Asia, “Based on open source, Bluemix helps startups get a single development and management experience across any combination of public, dedicated and local Bluemix instances. Even if clients have existing infrastructure setups or application program interface (API), they can securely connect those to Bluemix for a hybrid solution.”

Successful Startups & Bluemix

Yipeedo, a mobile-only platform helping urban city dwellers get the most from their environs, uses Bluemix for its application development. The application analyzes user tastes and preferences and uses this data to recommend suitable activities. Wolken Software also utilized Bluemix when building their TeamToq app, an enterprise-class app enabling secure and collaborative device agnostic discussions between individuals, enterprise apps, and enterprise cloud apps. And KlickDoc, a comprehensive cloud-based healthcare platform connecting patients with doctors, diagnostic centers, and pharmacies makes use of IBM Bluemix as the development platform for their programming language, PHP runtime. Srinath Ranga, founder of OpteamizeCloud Solutions, a corporate connect marketplace built on Bluemix, asserts, “As a startup, we need app development platforms that are fast, secured, and easy to use. IBM has a deep understanding of the startup environment and is helping us create a market differentiation through its cloud-based solutions. Bluemix, with cutting edge features like deep analytics or cognitive capabilities, makes apps a lot more innovative and interesting for our audiences.”

Alternative Platforms

Of course, Bluemix isn’t the only cloud platform providing support to startups, and along with some of the house brands like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, a variety of diverse platforms are available to back up emerging startups. Fusio is an open source API management platform that helps developers build and manage RESTful APIs, and provides endpoint versioning, schema definition, secure authorization, and the ability to handle data from different sources. And Apigee, another free tools platform for testing, debugging, protecting and analytics on API, is a highly scalable hybrid that helps developers build apps faster, predict next best action, and connects developers. Along with Cloud Foundry, Cloudify, and OpenShift, Apache CloudStack is notable, designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines as a highly scalable and available Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

Whatever platform exploited, the cloud market is thriving. Says Malhotra, “Cloud is the wave of the future and given the inter-linkages with mobility, big data, and social, we foresee the migration of all enterprise data to public, private or hybrid cloud model within the next few years.”

By Jennifer Klostermann