IBM has been making a series of radical – and rapid - acquisitions as it attempts to differentiate its focus on Cloud solutions, in addition to analytics and cognitive applications and services. One of the most potentially disruptive areas of cloud technology is Platform-as-a-Service and integrated cloud platforms. The use of a cloud-based development environment with access to a number of rich tools, pre-integrated software and value added services, such as video streaming, gives developers much more scope to develop rapidly enterprise-class cloud solutions.
IBM has announced the acquisition of Ustream, a cloud-based video streaming service, for an undisclosed sum. Ustream provides a number of cloud-based video streaming services to both broadcasters and enterprise clients. The service provider streams live and on-demand video content to 80 million viewers per month for customers including NASA, Samsung, Facebook, Nike and The Discovery Channel. Ustream was headquartered in San Francisco, with a development office in Budapest, Hungary, and data centers in San Jose, Calif.; Amsterdam; and Tokyo.
With this acquisition IBM has formed a new business unit – IBM Cloud Video Services – that will include existing video related assets from IBM’s R&D labs with recent acqusitions it has made in video content over the last 2 years. IBM bought ClearLeap video management in December 2015 and Cleversafe, a video storage provider in October 2015. Additionally, the new business unit will include Aspera, a software company acquired in 2013 that specializes in high-speed file transfer.
The fact that this gives IBM a new revenue stream (no pun intended) selling video streaming products and services is not the most interesting thing about this announcement. One of the most important parts of the Ustream portfolio is the open Ustream Development Platform which enables clients to create custom video apps to run video on any device and embed video into any application, securely and reliably. Clients can use the company’s real-time social sentiment analytics to gauge audience reactions to the live streaming content. The integration of the service into Bluemix is the most exciting part of this.
IBM's acquisition will give Bluemix developers access to a number of services within the platform that make developing high-quality video apps and video streaming platforms quicker and easier.
Platform-as-a- Service and to a certain extent, hybrid cloud platforms, have been struggling to find their place in the market over the last year. Other cloud paradigms like SaaS and IaaS are relatively easy to understand because they have directly comparable traditional compute analogues. Arguably, PaaS requires a bigger change in mindset, but is likely to play an increasingly important role in IT development as one of the main ways DevOps is underpinned. Hence, having platforms with higher value tools and services is vital to differentiate it from traditional and IaaS based cloud development environments.
Service Provider : IBM