(Image Credit: iStockPhoto/adventtr)

IBM has a range of ‘Bluemix Garages’ which offer a physical space for multi-disciplinary teams, including developers, product managers and designers, to collaborate with IBM experts. A new Bluemix Garage has opened in Nice, Paris to provide European developers with a place to ensure their IBM cloud-based software is the best it can be. 

Joining garages in San Francisco, Toronto, and London, the new opening in Nice will serve as the counterpart to IBM’s Bluemix Garage in London, the company’s northern anchor to the continent’s innovation scene. Europe has a current base of around 1.6 million developers and growing which makes it an important continent for IBM to be a key part of and help it grow to meet the expected 20 million developers by 2020. 

IBM’s garage in London was launched in 2014, and draws more than 20,000 developers per week from innovators seeking new ways to use IBM’s Cloud for increasingly complex and impressive projects. As of writing, IBM’s team at its London-based Garage are working alongside Simon Wheatcroft, a blind ultra-marathon runner, to use IBM Cloud APIs and services, such as Cloudant, IBM’s database-as-a-service, to use data to direct, monitor, and pace him through a solo, 60-mile run through a desert in Namibia. 

The new Garage in Nice is co-located within the European Business Innovation Center (BIC) of Nice Metropole, the region’s largest startup incubator. IBM claims it will help developers through: 

• Business Development: Combining enterprise acumen, agile methods, and a unique process to design, build and deploy, Garage consultants help clients to refine, iterate on and deliver a business idea into an app. 

• Protecting Existing Investments: Tapping IBM Cloud’s hybrid and open models, Garage consultants help companies to seamlessly move existing data workloads to the cloud, lowering cost and adding enhancements, as well as connecting existing systems into new cloud apps. 

• Speeding App Development: Through the Garage’s expertise in agility, extreme programming, DevOps and more, Garage consultants help businesses to significantly reduce the time it takes to design and build new services, applications or products. 

• Skills Development: Equipping development teams with the skills and expertise needed on Bluemix, IBM’s Cloud Platform, Garage teams help businesses to rapidly scale cloud capabilities and implement agile development. 

“Our latest Bluemix Garage in Nice is a critical addition to our network of Garages across Europe and globally, and will help our clients to more quickly build with IBM Cloud,” said Steve Robinson, General Manager, Client Technical Engagement of IBM Cloud. “IBM Cloud offers companies the most rapid on-ramp, and most robust toolset, for their developers to create the apps they need to succeed and compete.” 

Bluemix has become an indispensable cloud platform for many developers, growing rapidly to become the largest public Cloud Foundry deployment in the world. We’ve covered its development and related tools several times in the past; including the addition of Node.js debugging last October, and the launch of IBM’s Globalization Pipeline in November to ensure your Bluemix app is translated into different languages for deployment in various markets. 

There are too many Bluemix tools and services for us to cover them all, in fact the open standards-based platform now features over 140 spanning the categories of big data, mobile, Watson, analytics, integration, DevOps, security and the Internet of Things. 

One local startup in Nice, ADVANSOLAR, focuses on sustainable mobility solutions and tapped IBM Cloud and Design practices in the Garage to create and deploy its new electric bicycle rental services in just weeks – cutting the time needed to get to market by more than 50 percent. “Combining the power, openness and agility of IBM Cloud with the Garage’s expertise enabled us to create a valuable product rapidly, and deliver our rental services at the right price for all our customers,” said Raphael Briere, CEO of ADVANSOLAR. 

To learn more about IBM Bluemix Garages, visit here. 

Have you ever visited an IBM Bluemix Garage? Share your experience in the comments.