<p>IBM believes it's making a safe bet by opening its middleware stack to its SoftLayer Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud. They'd better be. Big Blue's putting a billion dollars on the table.</p><p>This combination, called BlueMix, also makes use of Cloud Foundry, an open-source PaaS. BlueMix's goal is to "enable developers to rapidly build, deploy, and manage their cloud applications, while tapping a growing ecosystem of available services and runtime frameworks."</p><p>Specifically, BlueMix, which is now in beta, is meant to help programmers build cloud applications that will:</p><p>Reduce time for application/infrastructure provisioning</p><p><a href="http://www.zdnet.com/ibm-places-billion-dollar-bet-on-bluemix-paas-cloud-7000026705/">Keep reading...</a></p>