By Graham K. Rogers

An IBM announcement about the availability of its Bluemix cloud solution in China underlines both the growning importance of cloud technology to enterprise and the need for companies to engage with China

Since IBM (IBM:US) launched its open-standards based cloud computing solution, Bluemix, in 2014, it has grown and is now "the largest Cloud Foundry deployment in the world" with more than "120 tools and services spanning categories of big data, mobile, Watson, analytics, integration, DevOps, security and Internet of Things."

A logical area of expansion in this area for IBM is China which has seen massive growth over the past few years, particularly in IT-related industries. As well as major manufacturing plants for many western companies, such as CISCO, Dell, HP and Apple, China is "home to 10 percent of the entire global population of developers".

To help drive further expansion and to capitalise on the already-existing developer community, IBM has entered into a collaboration with 21Vianet Group - a leading carrier-neutral internet data center services provider - to make Bluemix available to developers and enterprises in China.

The agreement is for 21Vianet (VNET:US) to provide the necessary infrastructure for the services, and to assume responsibility for the running of the service within China, while IBM while provide access to the Bluemix technologies. The aim is to generate an ecosystem in which cloud-based solutions are developed to assist in the building of new apps and technologies.

More information is available from IBM at its IBM Cloud pages

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. He is now continuing that in the Bangkok Post supplement, Life.