IBM (IBM) Business Partners will play an important role in the upcoming IBM platform as a service (PaaS) Big Blue has dubbed Codename: BlueMix. Designed to provide DevOps capabilities to help developers create an open development and scalable experience, BlueMix will provide more than 200 software solutions from IBM and IBM Business Partners.

As Talkin’ Cloud reported in February, IBM is making a rather large investment in PaaS cloud development to the tune of $1 billion. Big Blue seems to be tired of playing the shadows of the other big boys of the cloud platform space, and it’s putting its money where its mouth is. And it’s aiming to keep the BlueMix PaaS fixed to open standards.

BlueMix is, of course, still in beta, but IBM has high hopes developers will turn to it so they “can act like kids in a sandbox,” so says the landing page. The technology giant is also pushing the enterprise-grade aspect to the new PaaS offering.

But in the end, BlueMix is an element of IBM’s overall hybrid cloud strategy. And it’s a big part of the company’s increasing focus on the cloud and will likely play a large role in its attempts to gain additional traction in the cloud space.

“There’s solid promise here, and my expectation is that at this stage of the game, PaaS might well be a much stronger play for IBM than IaaS, at least in terms of the ability to articulate the overall value of the IBM ecosystem and make an argument for making a strategic bet on IBM in the cloud,” Lydia Leong, research vice president at Gartner, noted in a blog post at the time of BlueMix’s announcement.

How things will shape up for IBM Codename: BlueMix is anybody’s guess, but it might be the offering that gives IBM a big boost in the cloud space.