IBM has been positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s (News – Alert) Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms. Officials from IBM said that the company has been recognized for Worklight, IBM’s mobile application development platform.

A member of the IBM (News – Alert) MobileFirst family of solutions, IBM Worklight provides an open, comprehensive and advanced mobile application platform to build, run and manage mobile applications. With Worklight, a user can efficiently develop, run and manage HTML5, hybrid and native apps. The solution helps users to reduce their development cost, improve time-to-market and enhance mobile app governance and security. IBM Worklight uses standards-based technologies that avoid the use of code translation, proprietary interpreters and unpopular scripting languages.

"IBM MobileFirst, which includes IBM Worklight, represents the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio of services and software to help clients benefit from the emerging mobile economy," said Phil Buckellew, vice president, IBM Mobile Enterprise. "Today, with 90 percent of mobile users keeping their device within arm’s reach 100 percent of the time, businesses need assurance that mobile apps can be deployed instantly and across a range of mobile devices including iOS and Android (News – Alert) phones and tablets. This is where IBM Worklight and the IBM MobileFirst portfolio excel."

Meanwhile, IBM has joined other technology firms to form the OpenPOWER Consortium – an open development alliance based on IBM’s POWER microprocessor architecture. The Consortium, made up of IBM, Google Mellanox, NVIDIA (News – Alert) and Tyan, intend to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centres. The move makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time, as well as making POWER IP licensable to others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform. The consortium will offer open-source POWER firmware, the software that controls basic chip functions.