IBM recently hosted a series of enablement sessions for students and faculty from the country’s leading universities to introduce the company’s latest Cloud offering, Bluemix.
Bluemix is a platform as a service (PaaS) offering based on the Cloud Foundry open source project that promises to deliver enterprise-level features and services that are easy to integrate into cloud applications.
The sessions which ran for a period of two months, and participated in by ten schools, culminated on September 18, 2014 with the Bluemix Challenge Finals held at the IBM Innovation Center in Commonwealth, Quezon City.
In the Bluemix Challenge, schools were asked to develop applications aimed at solving specific problems that may have commercial or societal impact. The submitted Bluemix Apps were evaluated based on their effectiveness in solving the problem, significance, the innovative use of Bluemix services and design/aesthetics.
Participants of the IBM Bluemix Challenge
In the final round, the top five teams were given a problem on the spot that may be solved through an application that they developed in Bluemix. They were given five hours to develop their application. The applications were presented during the Bluemix Fair to a panel of IT experts who evaluated their applications based on effectiveness in solving the problem, use of Bluemix services, design/aesthetics, and presentation.
De La Salle University team (Fritz Kevin Flores, Joshua Jorel Lee, Faculty Coach: Katrina Solomon) won the challenge, with their Bluemix App, “Metro Watch”, which allows citizens to report problems such as potholes, illegal terminals, broken street lamps, among others, that commonly impede smooth and safe traffic across the Metropolis. Metro Watch is composed of two modules: administration and reporting. The administration module provides officials with both a summarized and detailed view of the problems reported by their constituents. The module is written in PHP and uses the MySQL service available in Bluemix. The reporting module is a mobile application that provides constituents an interface to report problems. This module is developed using RapidApps. RapidApps is a Bluemix service that allows programmers to quickly develop data-centric web and mobile apps using visual tools – without coding.
“The IBM Bluemix Challenge aims to provide awareness to the academic community on the virtually limitless possibilities of Cloud as Platform as a Service (PaaS),” said Luis Pineda, President and Country General Manager of IBM Philippines. “As future entrepreneurs and leaders, students can use the IBM Bluemix at no cost, to develop applications in an enterprise-quality platform to help them produce innovative solutions for business and society.”
