IBM jStart

jStart was founded as a vehicle to engage and validate Java technology with customers/clients. In 1999 it broadened its mission to cover the much wider concept of “emerging internet technologies”.

Timeline of technologies jStart has been involved in:

• 1997: Java - promoted and championed Java to large enterprise environments
• 1999: Beyond Java - evolved from that evangelism mission to introduce new and emerging internet techs into IBM and to IBM's customers/clients by validating emerging technologies with a client engagement model.
• 2001: S.O.A., XML
• 2004: Web Services
• 2006: Web 2.0 in the Enterprise ("Web 2.0 Goes to Work")
• 2007: RIA (Rich Internet Applications)
• 2009: Mashup Technologies
• 2010: Big Data/Very large data analytics, cross-platform mobile development
• 2011: Watson commercialization, DeepQA, machine learning
• 2012: Social Analytics, big data analytics applied to social data
• 2013: IBM Bluemix, a next-gen XaaS cloud platform[2]

What differentiates the team from other IBM groups is how jStart validates emerging technologies: it is the primary engagement vehicle for IBM to validate emerging technologies while those technologies are in their emergent stage for enterprise business environments. Because of this, jStart was the first to introduce these technologies into large Fortune 500 IT infrastructures as well as smaller SMB environments by addressing existing business needs (rather than theoretical R&D business scenarios). The team is working to commercialize IBM's Watson system and is a proponent of cloud offerings.

In 2016 IBM jStart partnered with Water Mission with a purpose to advance the technology and to provide clean and safe water to numerous communities worldwide. Both teams are set to work on three major projects. One of them includes creating a dashboard that would provide real-time data alerts and analysis for the global operations that include over 2,000 current and all of the potential safe water systems. The goal of the system is to enable making more strategic decisions and to assess the financial state and performance of every system.[3]

Another project includes the creation of an Early Warning System. The purpose of the system will be to analyze the trends and patterns that can cause drought and water-related issues in East Africa.[3]

The final project is advising which will be provided by jStart on Water Mission's Research and Development team regarding the "programmable logic controllers (PLCs) on new membrane filtration systems that could potentially be used to redesign the original safe water treatment system."[3]

The jStart team has developed a model in which customer engagements drive its exploration of emerging technologies. It does this by engaging hundreds of clients per year to validate emerging technology priorities (using a client-driven development model instead of a research-driven model). jStart has used this model for each of the technologies it has helped to launch and/or develop. A number of technologies the team has worked with have gone on to graduate into open source projects, have become IBM products, or have been licensed to third parties. Other, less successful technologies, were discontinued when it was determined that, based on client/customer engagements, those technologies were not applicable to enterprise environments.[4]

• Bluemix Launches in South Korea