IBM late last month
announced a strategic collaboration with San Francisco-based startup Lightbend to work on a new platform
for cognitive development. The goal is to give Java and Scala developers a
complete toolchain for building AI and cognitive applications that run on
premises, hybrid or in the cloud.
And now, IBM announced it has joined a $15
million funding round in Lightbend, along with Intel, Bain, Shasta, Juniper and
strategic venture capital investors.
I spoke to Lightbend CEO Mark Brewer to
learn more.
VMblog: The joint solution collaboration work with IBM looks
like a potential game changer for Lightbend, putting you right in the middle of
IBM's strategic focus today for developers. The investment must be icing on the
cake? What does it mean?
Mark Brewer: IBM is the leader in AI and cognitive applications,
particularly around their Watson project. We're the leading Reactive Platform
provider helping developers build applications that are highly distributed,
flexible, scalable and resilient. It turns out these qualities are important as
well to developers building AI and cognitive applications.
Collaborating with
IBM on joint solutions was a logical next step. We think we can accelerate
adoption of our solutions among the world's 1+ million Scala developers and 10+
million Java developers by partnering with IBM. IBM is putting engineering
talent and its own investment dollars behind our technology.
VMblog: Can you break down in more detail how the technology
collaboration will work?
Brewer: The vision behind our collaboration is to expose Watson
and cognitive-driven applications as microservices that can be integrated into
broader systems, including IBM Websphere. The challenge is how to make
microservices available in real-time, all the time. How does cognitive get
driven into application architectures?
At a business level, we see competitive
market forces pushing companies to get value out of data faster. As a result,
CIOs and data center architects are turning to programming languages and
frameworks based on their ability to deliver responsiveness, resiliency and elasticity.
Lightbend has developed a stack of software that delivers these qualities and
that runs today in production at enterprises as varied as Paypal, Verizon and
Walmart.
Working with IBM on an integrated platform for cognitive development
is a natural progression of our work to support advanced cognitive application
development.
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