A lot of people seem to dismiss this as a bad idea, but it makes sense to me. I see it as IBM becoming the "SourceBits for Enterprise Customers" [0]. They just

A lot of people seem to dismiss this as a bad idea, but it makes sense to me. I see it as IBM becoming the "SourceBits for Enterprise Customers" [0]. They just add another zero or two on their hourly rate and package it up into a "solution". Also, the article mentions retail as an initial target industry. Their Websphere platform powers some big ecommerce sites [1]. Now they can go after those customers and sell them mobile retail solutions. Plus it's probably a big F&B for the sales team selling Websphere. I'm sure the same goes for any commercial "products" IBM has for banking/travel/healthcare. Even if they just act as "implementation providers" for 3rd party products, to be able to say "choose us because we will also build you an iPad app for your BIGHealthDataSystem install" is pretty huge. Also, this is great for iOS developers because there will be more jobs available. Hopefully (and I'm reaching on this one), it also means IBM will create/contribute to more open-source iOS/Obj-C/Swift projects and tools. [0] http://www.sourcebits.com/ http://www.sourcebits.com/ [1] https://www.sparkred.com/blog/2013-leading-ecommerce-platforms-for-the-top-100-online-retailers-research/ https://www.sparkred.com/blog/2013-leading-ecommerce-platfor...