IBM Cloud Foundry

High scalablity

Easy integration with few clicks

High security provided

Free allowance in every 30 days

Needs better documentation

Better support required

Needs to improve on flexibility for setting resources

Tough to access third party APIs

Good Scaling

Easy to use

Variety of Languages

Not suitable for deploying large apps

The user interface needs improvement

Enabling new services and the management of those services without involving another group.

A wide variety of access to APIs and services

It simplifies our internal documentation by reducing the number of steps that need to be taken.

I’d love to see labels when marketing-names are used; for example, Cloudant is tough when I’m not aware what that brand is, but need to create a new database.

Ability to copy projects, services, data, databases between domains - so a user of the IBM cloud with a partner of ours could build and test something, and then move it over to our account when it’s ready. Maybe that already exists.

Easier access to third party APIs; perhaps a catalog of solutions from other vendors / a marketplace.

Intuitive user interface makes it easy for anyone to use, regardless of their professional background.

A lot of the services integrate well with external platforms, APIs, and programs, not just IBM services. A lot of the competitors in this space lack this ability.

Maybe it is just our contract in particular, but support and help is always made available.

Need: VISUALIZATION CAPABILITIES! Particularly with the Conversation Service.

Need: Annotation capabilities for dialog nodes in Conversation Service.

Need: Search/querying capabilities in Conversation Service

Need: Clearer documentation of the S2T service. I had to use a third party website for an understanding of how to use this.

Visual recognition. We put together a number of very effective demonstrations, over a short period (7-10 days) to show our management team as well as customers how it would be done, how the Bluemix applications could be integrated with other services (eg. Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft's OneDrive) to create one very capable, automated, integrated application that could solve one of our customer's knotty problems.

The visual recognition application was the only thing we tried during this 7-10 days period. Significant issues with technical and account support (there was absolutely none in any time of what would be considered a 'timely' manner, led us to realize that it was not a service we could use for production, and we therefore did not continue to try out other services.

Although we didn't get to the point of using several services, the services for storage and visual recognition, as well as those for integrating with other cloud provider services (e.g., AWS) were smooth and effortless.

ALMOST EVERYTHING. Account support was virtually non-existent. We had set up a trial account on the basis of how many training images we could use (they advertised that it was something like 100 per day--but it turned out that the actual number was for the entire trial period. Thus, we almost immediately ran into our limit and could not proceed. We set up a second trial account, but couldn't get that one to work at all (with no meaningful error messages to why it wasn't working). Finally in desperation, we set up a third account tied to a personal credit card. (It was the weekend and we had to have a demonstration ready for Monday afternoon.) That third account, although setup, also would not work. (Some of the problems could have been the result of not having three separate, easily available emails, phone numbers, and billing addresses to use in setting up the accounts, which certainly exacerbated the issues.) On Monday morning we were finally able to reach someone that helped get the 'billed' account turned up--but even they admitted they could not figure out why it had not worked on Sunday.

Over the period of about three days we made multiple attempts to reach both technical and account support. Generally the wait was something close to 24 hours, far, far beyond what we would be able to use in a production environment.

Technical support was generally quite a bit more helpful that the account support team. The technical folks were able to get 'stuck' and non-working account working again, but the account support team was completely unable to provide any billing information. This included how much had been billed to the 'personal' credit card (the one we had to use because it was setup during the weekend when our own internal finance folks couldn't provide a company credit card), and they were completely unable to provide an actual statement, either then or for months later.

One thing of particular note--the 'on-line help' feature for account services was extremely disappointing. There was absolutely no way to get any kind of billing or accounting information using the on-line services. You would think that you could, but you simply can not!

We were finally able to get an accounting almost 6 months later and ONLY because it had gone to some form of 'collection' department within IBM and they were trying to get the final $24 paid. (The biggest part of the amount due from the demonstration period, which was about 7-10 days and had amounted to about $350 in charges, at least 10 times what we had expected) had been automatically charged to the 'personal' credit card we used in desperation to get an account set up so we could get a very important demonstration for our out-of-town customers who were expecting a demonstration the following Monday afternoon. However, the billing fell across two accounting months, with only about $24 in the second month, but during that account, the bank had changed their association with MasterCard to Visa and had issued new cards and rejected any automatic billing to the old card. This left a balance of $24 to be paid, which we had no clue of. We noticed that we had only received the one bill, but not the second, but again, calls to IBM were either not returned or the people we reached told us they could not find out how much was still owed or how we could pay the balance by phone. Finally, almost 6 months after our demo, we received an email from their 'collections' department. We told them that we were not going to provide every 1 cent of funds UNTIL they provided us with an accounting of the services used, etc. That took a few days and we were finally able to get the $24 resolved.

We explained most of this to at least five different technical/account support people along the way. At NO time, did ANY IBM representative ever offer ANY kind of 'consideration' for the trouble we had had, even after learning that the company was unable to reimburse us for 'personal' expenses BECAUSE we could not receive a standard billing statement.

PaaS

Watson (did not use in prd, just saw good demos)

Bare metal servers

At the time we used there was no direct Docker offering (had to use containers via CloudFoundry api, which is another layer to learn)

No hosted Cassandra database offering (or similar DB, like Amazon Dynamo)

I was unable to use VPN link with another provider: Both sides had incompatible configurations and it was impossible to instantiate working VPN connection. Support was only able to point that the other party uses settings that are incompatible with IBM.

Makes a number of integrated modules available seamlessly (e.g., mobile, database, authentication, etc.

The node js platform for hosting IoT components is extremely easy to use.

The node-red graphical wiring tool is makes it especially easy to integrate 3rd party services.

Excellent customer support.

More tutorials/education materials for Cloudant would be nice.

More flexible notifications for outages would be helpful.

More integrations to third party services within node-red would be useful.