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IBM Announces New Features for its Open Serverless Platform

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International Business Machines Corporation (IBM - Free Report) recently stated that its Bluemix OpenWhisk technology, an event-driven, open serverless computing platform, is seeing increased adoption across a wide range of industries. The company also announced the inclusion of new features within the OpenWhisk platform so as to enable developers to quickly debug a code, write programs in a wide range of programming languages as well as support third-party tools.

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What is Driving Adoption of OpenWhisk ?

OpenWhisk provides an open, non-proprietary platform for developers and the codes are easily accessible in active developer communities such as Apache. This helps developers to access a range of capabilities on the platform. Since it’s an open serverless platform, developers have the choice of deciding where they want to run their apps.

This flexibility is leading to increased OpenWhisk adoptions.

What’s in Store for IBM?  

The implementation of IBM’s Open Cloud Architecture, IBM Bluemix is based on Cloud Foundry, an open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) that helps organizations to integrate enterprise-level services with their existing cloud applications.

As per a report by Transparency Market Research, worldwide spending on PaaS is estimated to reach $7.98 billion by 2020, up at a CAGR of 25.7%.

Although there is stiff competition in the PaaS space with the presence of major players such as Microsoft’s (MSFT - Free Report) Azure, Amazon’s (AMZN - Free Report) EC2 and Salesforce’s (CRM - Free Report) Heroku, IBM is trying its best to establish its presence in the field and have a share of the $7.98 billion pie.

Stock Price Performance

Notably, shares of IBM have underperformed the broader Zacks Computer Integrated Systems industry on a year-to-date basis. While the industry generated a return of 31.0%, the stock returned 22.1%.

The underperformance of the stock could be due to sluggish IT spending particularly on on-premise and data center hardware and foreign exchange volatility. Moreover, intensifying competition in the cloud remains a major concern for the company. However, IBM's strategic growth initiatives, including its Big Data & business analytics, cloud computing, mobile and social business are expected to drive growth in the coming quarters. 

Zacks Rank and Key Picks

At present, IBM carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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