IBM Reinforces MobileFirst

At two recent customer conferences, IBM showcased the latest rendition of its "MobileFirst" initiative for developers. IBM MobileFirst comprises a set of products, including Worklight, MaaS360, Tealeaf CX Mobile, Xtify, and newly announced Bluemix cloud services. Collectively, these products enable IBM customers to rapidly deploy, manage, secure, and monitor mobile apps. But, overlapping services and at least a half dozen product SKUs make deployment planning a challenge for mobile development teams. IBM still faces a fair amount of integration work to consolidate these previously separate products, and to simplify them into a consistent set of mobile infrastructure services that clients can deploy on premises or via a public cloud. This report details the current state of the IBM MobileFirst initiative, and where we expect IBM to take it over the next year.