Cloud is a growth engine for business, and no one plays

a greater part in that growth than developers.

Every great innovation runs through a developer's hands

and they're leading traditional and cloud-based enterprises

into a new era of client engagement.

For those of you new to the cloud, you'll always hear about three layers:

IaaS, SaaS and PaaS.

Infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and platform as a service.

The "as a service" model is changing how organizations work.

The infrastructure layer makes up the core cloud services:

the hardware, operations and infrastructure.

The services layer provides the viable components that can

operate independently or as building blocks for composing applications.

And the platform layer binds these layers together

and lets developers deploy the resulting applications into the cloud.

It's costly and time consuming to develop code from scratch.

Nothing's worse than writing code that's already been written.

Platform as a service lets developers build and deploy

applications rapidly. It's instant access to enterprise

and open-source software, open standards and code samples,

lets developers innovate efficiently, without having to manage

infrastructure resources.

This speeds up developments from months to weeks, and from weeks to days.

When developers can quickly design and test software,

and scale to meet changing business demand,

their business can stay ahead of the competition.

With the growing shift towards cloud-based services,

customer expectations are heightening.

This makes enterprises' speed and agility critical.

Businesses that can't deliver fast enought can lose out.

And yet, of the 18 million developers in the world, fewer than 25%

are developing forthe cloud, and even fewer are developing for the public cloud.

As we work with our extensive client roster of cloud-based innovators,

we've determined a point of view based on three critical steps

that they're taking to attract the best developers and ensure their success.

Number one: they're putting an integrated application development platform,

a PaaS, at the center of their business.

A cloud-based platform has to provide a flexible environment to support

an enterprise's changing needs, and it has to offer pre-configured services

so the developers can build custom applications quickly.

It has to let developers choose the right components, configurations,

and software without tying them down to one vendor or one practice,

and, of course, it has to deliver the service in a secure, scalable, stable environment.

Number two: they're defining a strategy for integrating

new apps with existing environments.

New cloud application have more and more mobile, social and analytical

capabilities. The modern enterprise needs an effective strategy

to connect these new applications with existing interfaces and

infrastructures that they have spent decades developing.

To ease this integration, part of our strategy is to

deliver a middleware stack as a service to our clients.

Number three: they're implementing a continuous

delivery experience.

Gone are the days of extended release cycles.

In cloud development, speed allows you to be in constant delivery mode.

Today's developers want to deliver innovation quickly and continuously.

Whether it's a local team of developers or a network of teams across the globe,

the right cloud platform has to let the innovators collaborate and roll out enhancements.

That's our point of view on how to select the right PaaS environtment.

At IBM, we specifically designed our platform to perform

all three of these fundamental elements.

So developers can build software that was unthinkable and economically impossible

even a few years ago.

We focus on providing the right tools, training, software and services

for the cloud developer.

Because today, the most successful companies are gonna be the ones

that understand the strategic role that developers will play in their success.