When IBM announced their strategic investment in Lightbend last year, one of the main goals was to extend the reach of Lightbend’s reactive technology to enterprises globally. The reasoning was that in order for enterprises to be able to harness the potential for data and AI to dramatically improve their businesses, modern reactive application infrastructure would be required to build cloud-native applications to support their digital transformation journey.
Our relationship with IBM continues to produce fantastic tools for the Java and Scala developer community. The latest offering to emerge from working together is IBM’s Reactive Platform Development Accelerator, which aims to speed up time to value as developers move from prototyping, to proof of technology, to production deployment of their cloud native solutions.
Based on Lightbend Reactive Platform, the IBM Reactive Platform Development Accelerator connects developers with Scala, Akka, Play, and Lagom subject matter experts and open source committers at IBM and Lightbend. Importantly, it also provides developers access to the application management, monitoring, and advanced tools for Reactive Platform to get developers and DevOps teams ready long before it comes time to deploy to production.
One of the key benefits of this offering is direct access to the experts behind these open source technologies. It’s in this direct connection to experts that development teams have been able to accelerate learning and project success by removing blockers and promoting knowledge transfer more seamlessly. Our customer Verizon, for example, is a particular fan of this one-to-one mentorship and expertise (read case study):
You guys ROCK and have ROCK STARS :) Believe it or not, but I have not seen such quality response from any support group. And, super fast like light traveling in space...
Keyur ShahAssociate Fellow, Engineer, Verizon
Back in 2016, we partnered with IBM to lead their Big Data University's core curriculum in the areas of Scala, Reactive Programming and Apache Spark. As of today, over 20,000 developers have gotten involved with the Scala Programming for Data Science learning path on cognitiveclass.ai. We also started working with IBM on some of the core components for products such as Watson Studio.
The two companies agreed to partner on strategic development on what became the IBM Reactive Platform. The first fruits of that partnership were a production offering from IBM to help developers containerize their Java workloads and run them on IBM Cloud Private (ICP). The IBM Reactive Platform Development Accelerator is the next phase of these efforts.
We have many more joint activities underway as part of the strategic partnership and we look forward to sharing those with you throughout the year.
To get started with Reactive Platform Development Accelerator, visit the IBM Marketplace. To get started with IBM Reactive Platform, you can access a growing list of code patterns and sample projects with Akka, Lagom and Play. You can also meet up with IBM and Lightbend experts at Scala Days 2018 in both Berlin (May 2018) and New York City (June 2018).
