IBM Corp. announced a collaboration today with Lightbend Inc. in a bid to fire up the creation of artificial intelligence applications in large enterprises.

Lightbend is the provider of the world’s leading development platform for so-called “Reactive” applications, which are highly distributed, flexible and tolerant of failures. Together, the two companies seek to build a complete toolchain for AI development for Java and Scala developers.

“Working with IBM on an integrated platform for cognitive development is a natural progression of our work to support advanced cognitive application development,” said Mark Brewer, president and chief executive officer at Lightbend.

Lightbend expects that the alliance with IBM will bring exposure to potentially millions of developers that use Java and Scala in the enterprise. For its part, IBM sees this as an opportunity to shape a developer community in the emerging AI and cognitive computing industry using Scala and Java.

“This [deal] brings us right into the center of the community we want to build,” said Bob Lord, IBM’s chief digital officer. “This now gives us a really interesting angle to help Scala and Java developers bring new applications into the enterprise.”

As AI research and machine learning development continue to make headway into enterprise environments, more developers are turning to Scala for its ability to handle complex algorithms and streaming data at scale. For example, modern big data frameworks such as Spark, Kafka and Akka are written in Scala.

Java itself is an extremely common language amid developers generally, as well as in enterprise environments. The language ranked No. 2 in Redmonk’s June 2017 language rankings and has maintained a similarly high post over the past few years. Java is also popular in AI development because of its versatility and ease of use as an object-oriented programming language.

Lightbend is particularly well-positioned to assist Scala developers when it comes to AI development because the company’s founder, Martin Odersky, is the creator of the Scala programming language. The company focuses on providing developers what it calls Reactive systems, described in detail in the “Reactive Manifesto.” The core of Reactive systems is to help developers create software that’s more flexible, scalable and tolerant to failure than legacy frameworks.

IBM intends to integrate Lightbend’s Reactive Application Development Platform, which brings important capabilities to developers for reactive programming, data and microservices. With this integration, IBM will extend its cloud portfolio of cloud services, including data analytics, cognitive and machine learning, and collaborative data science tools to use Lightbend’s architecture.

The objective is to give enterprise developers the tools needed to rapidly deploy AI and cognitive systems using Scala and Java. “Java and Scala are the languages of cognitive and AI development,” Lord said, “and cognitive development is the future.”

With Lightbend’s platform and IBM’s expertise in machine learning systems – as seen with the development and deployment of IBM’s flagship AI Watson – developers should be able to prototype, test and deploy new applications using cognitive systems more quickly.

Here’s a video explaining the deal:

Image: Pixabay