IBM Launches New Initiatives to Advance Developer Skills and Careers for the Cognitive Era

IBM (NYSE: IBM) launched new global programs and tools designed to propel developers’ skills and advance their careers around cloud and emerging technologies, such as cognitive and IoT. These initiatives include collaborations with Coursera and GitHub, which aim to reach millions of developers globally.

The announcements were unveiled in Bangalore at IBM DeveloperConnect to more than 10,000 developers across India, who attended in person or virtually via Livestream. Key highlights of the news include:

• A collaboration with Coursera to strengthen developers’ skills in India with new courses focused on cloud and IoT
• developerWorks Career Concierge, a cognitive learning tool that delivers personalized resources to advance developers’ skills
• The general availability of GitHub Enterprise on Bluemix Dedicated, the first collaborative coding platform delivered as a managed service
• New cloud tools for Swift and Watson designed for mobile development and cognitive apps

The news builds on the initiatives and investments IBM has already made in India, including the IBM Cloud data center in Chennai, which opened in 2015 to provide a local onramp to high-performing infrastructure as a service. Additionally, over the past year, IBM has launched three digital hubs with NASSCOM to connect Indian developers and startups with local resources and networking opportunities, and it has collaborated with developer partners TEXTIENT andInspireOne Technologies to bring cognitive solutions to the Indian market via the IBM Watson Ecosystem.

According to Evans Data Corp., the total worldwide developer population will exceed 25 million by 2020, with India expected to become the world’s largest developer ecosystem by 2018.[1] Indian developers are already embracing cloud and emerging technologies, including cognitive computing, faster than their global peers.[2]

“The world will be re-written in code and much of it will be done right here in India,” said Vanitha Narayanan, Managing Director, IBM India Private Limited. “Developers are an integral part of a new India that is underpinned by digital transformation.  IBM’s leading capabilities in Watson, IoT, cloud, mobile and blockchain will help developers innovate and succeed. At IBM, we are committed to investing in this ecosystem and will continue to collaborate with developers for a progressive India.”

To advance IBM’s continued commitment to India and spur innovations in cloud and emerging technologies around the world, the company has launched new programs to equip developers with the skills and technology they need for cognitive business.

IBM Bolsters Developers’ Skills and Careers for the Cognitive Era

• developerWorks Career Concierge – IBM is debuting a beta version of the developerWorks Career Concierge, a Watson-based personalized tool that helps developers progress in their cloud journey, regardless of their starting point. Developers answer a few questions about themselves and the Career Concierge uses the Watson Tradeoff Analytics API on Bluemix to provide a custom set of resources, training materials, code repos and events to help them advance in their careers.
• IBM and Coursera Launch Incentives for Full Stack Web Developers in India – IBM and Coursera have collaborated to strengthen the developer ecosystem in India. For Coursera’s global Full Stack Web Development course, IBM will support the top 20 Indian entrepreneurs who advance to the course’s capstone and use Bluemix to develop their projects. These entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to join the IBM Global Entrepreneur program and receive $120,000 per year in IBM Cloud credits.
• IBM and Coursera Team to Expand IoT Course – IBM has also teamed with Coursera to launch and expand the company’s first-ever enterprise-backed course, A Developer’s Guide to IoT. IBM and Coursera first introduced the Bluemix-based course in the U.S. in April 2016 and have now expanded it to additional countries, including India. Over 6,500 global students are already enrolled.

IBM Provides New Cloud Tools and Collaborative Coding for the Enterprise

• New Swift on the Cloud Capabilities from IBM – IBM has debuted two new capabilities to advance Swift on IBM Cloud.
  • IBM Cloud Tools for Swift: IBM introduced the beta version of IBM Cloud Tools for Swift to simplify the management and deployment of server-side assets in an environment complementary to Xcode. IBM Cloud Tools for Swift is a free app that provides a single, visual interface for developers to assemble, manage, deploy and monitor apps.
  • Swift on LinuxONE™: Developers can now use Swift on LinuxONE™, IBM’s Linux-only enterprise system, to create applications that connect into the hybrid cloud. By running Swift on LinuxONE, developers can combine the programming language they know with the system’s speed, security and scale.
• GitHub Enterprise goes live on Bluemix Dedicated – GitHub Enterprise is now available as a service on Bluemix Dedicated, IBM’s collaborative, cloud-based platform provided in a physically isolated cloud environment. As a Bluemix Dedicated service, GitHub Enterprise is integrated seamlessly into the developer experience, supporting high productivity across the DevOps lifecycle.​
• Watson Developer Cloud Application Starter Kit – To provide an easy entry point into cognitive and help developers infuse Watson capabilities into their apps more seamlessly, IBM has launched the Watson Developer Cloud Application Starter Kits, which provides code examples based on common use cases. Developers can leverage Business Intelligence (combining AlchemyLanguage, AlchemyData News and Tone Analyzer) to analyze news and social media, the Conversational Agent (combining Dialog and Natural Language Classifier) to guide users through a series of tasks in natural language rather than long form, and Audio Analysis (combining Speech to Text and Concept Insights) to extract concepts from a stream of audio and make recommendations based on those concepts.