IBM recently launched a free platform for Indian startups where they can develop and host mobile applications within no time. The platform is called BlueMix and has been launched with a mission of wooing the emerging ventures in India.
BlueMix will engage in a direct battle with Google’s App Engine, Amazon’s Elastic BeanStalk, Microsoft’s Azure, Salesforce’s Heroku and Critix’s XenApp environment, which are platforms like BlueMix and already exist in the market. All these platforms are being aggressively pushed towards the Indian developers by their corporations by the means of their ‘entrepreneurship’ programs and startup accelerators. There are some like SAP’s HANA accelerators which are paying attention only to startups which are manufacturing applications for the platform.
According to Ravi Gururaj, former head at Citrix and currently the Chairman of Nasscom 100 startups, there is a fierce battle going out between the application programming interfaces. A developer ends up being a platform’s evangelists as soon as he or she starts using it. This results in expansion of the ecosystem of platforms which in end benefits the corporation.
By venturing into business partnerships with local startups and accelerators, the Big Blue has a full proof plan of making it big in the growing ecosystem of startups of India in 2014. IBM, which is the world’s oldest company which made tabulating machines of the size of piano thinks that it has able to survive in the market this long due to its nature of preserving a startup culture. At IBM, the goal is to live forever and to survive that long, a company must always think like a startup.
It can up to two weeks for a developer to attain a domain, server storage and then amalgamate that with the database in a traditional system but that is not the case with BlueMix. With BlueMix, all this can be done within less than 30 seconds. The biggest advantage of these platforms is that it helps the startups by providing them with free tools and credits which results in saving of money, which is very important for startups in the initial phase.
In order to identify tech startups, IBM is considering doing partnership with Indian accelerators such as VC funds and Kyron from this year.
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