IBM has launched Cloud Marketplace, its self-service collection of software and services from IBM and partners that comes under one online portal.

Subtitled “Your gateway to cloud innovation”, IBM’s portal brings together a vast collection of business applications (SaaS), developer services including BlueMix (PaaS), and infrastructure services (IaaS).

It is billed as a simple and easy experience for three key user groups within the enterprise – developers, IT managers and business leaders - to learn, try, and buy software and services from IBM and its global partner ecosystem.

The portal contains cloud applications from IBM partners such as PayPal, Zend, SendGrid, MongoDB, Flow Seach and others.

"IBM Cloud marketplace puts big data analytics, mobile, social, commerce, integration ---- the full power of IBM-as-a-Service and our ecosystem --- at our clients' fingertips to help them quickly deliver innovative services to their constituents,” Robert LeBlanc, SVP, IBM Software & Cloud Solutions, said.

IBM has been late to the Cloud party, according to some observers, but is now betting heavily on a cloud future as its traditionally hefty hardware revenues falter.

The scale of  recent investments speaks to the seriousness of its intent: so far this year it has announced a $1.2bn investment to expand its global cloud footprint with SoftLayer (read more in FOCUS 35, out later this week); a $1bn investment a new business unit the Watson Group for cloud-delivered cognitive innovation; and the acquisition of cloud businesses Aspera, Cloudant and Silverpop which bring of its cloud related acquisitions to 17 since 2010.

IBM says its cloud revenue grew 50% in the first quarter of 2014.

IBM also invested $1bn investment in cloud development with the launch of Bluemix, enabling much of IBM middleware to the Cloud.

It said it is accelerating the expansion of the open cloud platform and launching more than 30 new services in Bluemix from IBM and partners for growth areas such as big data and analytics, cloud integration and Internet of Things.

Bluemix offers an entry point for developers to build and test applications in a sandbox-like environment before potentially offering them for sale in the IBM Cloud Marketplace. 

The company said is also working with partners to provide a collaborative physical space where start-ups and developers can collaborate to build and test applications in an accelerated environment using agile development methods and best practices.

IBM’s first Bluemix Garage Lab will be in San Francisco at start-up community Galvanize where Bluemix members will be able to work alongside IBM consultants and partners.