SCIENCE

IBM has expanded its Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud with support for Windows and new enhancements to better serve teams of developers. IBM is also introducing an integrated development and test environment and new software and services to allow developers to improve quality and speed across the application life cycle.

According to a recent IBM survey of 2,000 IT professionals worldwide, cloud computing and mobile will emerge as the most in-demand platforms for software application development and IT delivery over the next five years. With today's enhancements, IBM is extending its environment to allow more enterprise developers to take advantage of the Cloud for development and testing.  

Announced earlier this year, the IBM Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud allows enterprise clients to expand and enhance internal development and test processes with instant access to resources through IBM's secure, scalable cloud delivery model. The multi-tenant open cloud now includes support for Microsoft Windows 2003 and 2008 Data Center Editions. The enhanced environment includes additional performance and resiliency and features, allowing developers to:

• Rapidly configure environments and easily share them across development teams for more consistent application deployment
• Assign multiple internet protocol (IP) addresses to a single virtual instance, so they can implement security zones and enhance availability in the IBM Cloud
• Attach combinations of storage sizes to a virtual instance at the time of provisioning, ensuring higher performance and resiliency.

New Integrated Development and Test Environment for Cloud

IBM is introducing an Integrated Development and Test Environment, an end-to-end solution approach that integrates tools, processes and cloud infrastructure to enable clients to conduct more robust and complex testing earlier in the application development life cycle, while also reducing the cost of identifying and fixing software defects.    

The following software and services are now available in North America and Europe on the IBM Cloud:

• IBM Testing Services for Cloud - application virtualization: Clients rapidly create multiple virtual test environments customized for each development and testing team.  By providing testing teams with 24/7 availability without dependencies on back-end systems and data stores, the service gives testing teams the ability to test more thoroughly throughout the life cycle without worrying about data or service availability. A North American company using this service experienced a 22 percent reduction in the Function and System Test cycle and a 100 percent return in ROI within 90 days.
• IBM Testing Services for Cloud – performance testing: Brings together automation and performance testing tools to significantly reduce time by as much as 50 percent, the service provides flexible, utility-based testing that delivers on-demand performance testing, and offers robust, large-scale performance testing services to enterprises, via Cloud hosting.  This service identifies defects earlier in the cycle where they are less expensive to fix and eliminates performance-related bottlenecks.
• IBM Rational Load Testing on the IBM Cloud: Helping to address issues with infrastructure acquisition, maintenance and configuration for large scale performance testing by leveraging the IBM Cloud, IBM is announcing a technical preview of IBM Rational Load Testing on the IBM Cloud. The solution allows testers using IBM Rational Performance Tester to automatically provision virtual test agents and generate virtual users on IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud on a pay-as-you-go basis, significantly reducing infrastructure, software and test set up costs.
• IBM Deployment Planning and Automation: Taking advantage of existing IBM Rational and IBM Tivoli software tools, the new solution manages the automation and planning of software deployments into the cloud and other environments. Designed for organizations that need to deploy applications in a consistent manner, the suite of software supports the entire deployment lifecycle from environment discovery through deployment planning, to deployment automation and governance.

New Partners and Developer Resources

IBM is continuing to build an ecosystem of partners to deliver the most complete and comprehensive cloud computing solutions to clients. This ecosystem comprises existing and new cloud partners: Cohesive Flexible Technologies Corp (Cohesive FT) allows customer controlled networking in a cloud, Servoy provides a rapid application development and deployment environment for creating and building high-end enterprise applications on the cloud.

"Cloud users have been waiting for an enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure from a recognizable and trusted vendor.  IBM is clearly the answer.  Now customers can take advantage of application layer network control and security with VPN-Cubed inside the IBM's Smart Business Development and Test Cloud," said Patrick Kerpan, CTO of CohesiveFT.

IBM has also added online workshops, skills tutorials, cloud computing technical resources and social networking tools that enable users to build online relationships, share content, and grow a worldwide network of peers to drive innovation.  

Details and availability

Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud allows clients to work with their own images as well as images from across IBM Software Group including exciting offerings from the Rational, Information Management, WebSphere, Lotus and Tivoli brands, available in a variety of flexible licensing models.  

Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud is now available in North America and Europe with the Raleigh, North Carolina, USA and Ehningen, Germany data centers supporting the IBM clouds.