On August 5, IBM announced the opening of a new Bluemix Garage within the Ryerson Digital Media Zone. Following previous launches in San Francisco and London, England, this new addition to the university-based startup incubator is the first of its kind in Canada.
The Garage will offer a variety of services based upon IBM Bluemix, a cloud computing platform that the historic company built to help service clients both large and small. The staff at the Garage, which have access to IBM's vast resources, will be tasked with helping support any startups or enterprise clients that want to leverage the service.
"Bluemix provides a very rich set of services and supports all sorts of ways to do programming," says Rachel Reinitz, the CTO of IBM Bluemix Garage. "By doing so it enables developers to build applications much faster and it lowers the costs for companies of all sizes to build and deploy applications."
Reinitz, a resident of Silicon Valley and one of IBM's most distinguished engineers, is the one responsible for bringing the Garage to Canada.
"I picked Toronto very early on as a city, because we saw so much interest," "I have Canadian clients coming to San Francisco to work with us. IBM also has a presence in the city, and there’s a great downtown area. In a lot of ways, it was just a matter of finding the right location."
“We are pleased to welcome the first and only Canadian Bluemix Garage into the DMZ,” said Abdullah Snobar, executive director of the DMZ. “This new partnership will provide IBM with an opportunity to work with some of our country’s top tech talent to explore new ideas and methodologies. Our entrepreneurs will also greatly benefit from access to IBM’s expertise and vast business network.”