IBM let customers do the talking as it kicked off its InterConnect 2016 cloud conference this morning in Las Vegas.

Customers from Siemens AG’s Buildings Technologies Division (also an IBM partner), investment management firm Alpha Modus Corp. and Westpac Banking Corp. told how they are moving massive amounts of infrastructure to the cloud, in the process cutting provisioning times from 84 days to a few minutes, in Westpac’s case, and facilitating analytical insights that, in Alpha Modus’s case, enabled it to forecast a 500-point drop in the Dow while the market was still going up.

Customer speakers included (above, l. to r.) William Alessi, co-founder and CEO of Alpha Modus; Richard Holmes, Westpac’s general manager of infrastructure & operations; and Matthias Rebellius, CEO of Siemens’ Building Technologies Division.

Robert LeBlanc, IBM Cloud senior vice president, summarized the theme: “The conversation has shifted,” he said. Cloud “is no longer about cheap storage and compute. It’s about value. It’s not about moving to the cloud; it’s about leveraging the cloud.”

IBM headlined the keynote session by confirming a previously-announced partnership with VMware Inc. to jointly market and sell new offerings for hybrid cloud deployments. It also revealed some data to confirm that the company is, as LeBlanc said, “all in on cloud.”

Specifically, IBM rolled out more than 200 new and enhanced cloud services in 2015, opened eight new cloud data centers for a total of 46 internationally, logged 3.2 billion Watson API application program interface (API) calls per month and is training 20,000 new users in its Bluemix platform-as-a-service software each week. IBM is hosting cloud operations for more than 7,000 startups and has helped move 2,500 independent software vendors to the cloud.

Courting developers

The morning’s sessions were heavy on developer appeal. In addition to its earlier announcements, IBM revealed a new set of tools developers can use to build private and secure digital transactions into networks using the blockchain permission-less database. IBM has donated the project the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger blockchain project and is adding blockchain support to its Bluemix “garages” in New York, Tokyo, London and other cities.

LeBlanc also said IBM is committed to bringing end-to-end live-streamed and on-demand video services to the market through a combination of several recent acquisitions, including Clearleap Inc., Ustream Inc. and Aspera Inc. Big Blue’s intention is to take streaming video beyond entertainment for use in applications like remote learning, telemedicine and customer support, LeBlanc said.

Apple’s Vice President of Product Marketing Brian Croll also made an unscripted appearance to endorse IBM’s new cloud-based runtime and package catalog for the Swift programming language that Apple open-sourced in December. IBM claims to be the first cloud provider to enable the development of both cloud-native and server-based applications in Swift, which Croll said is now the number one open-source language on Github. IBM also announced a Swift package catalog to help developers discover applications already written and packaged in Swift.

Developers can start building Swift-based end-to-end applications on Bluemix and quickly deploy them with Kitura, a new open source web server that IBM is releasing on both OSX and Linux.