(LAS VEGAS) – IBM Monday announced updates to the “Mobile First” initiative it has adopted toward its integrations with enterprise customers.

At the kickoff to its annual Impact conference Tuesday morning, the recurring message was “Business. In Motion,” and that mantra materialized in numerous new products and updates to existing offerings in IBM’s portfolio.

Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president of the IBM software group, predicted the “Internet of Things” could grow to 20 billion connected devices by 2020, as he led up to the introduction of the company’s new MessageSight appliance. The new box will be able to connect one million devices, handle up to 13 million messages per second and takes about 30 minutes to deploy.

To go along with MessageSight, IBM unveiled new software for front and back office solutions. A new API management piece enables secure creation, management and socialization of APIs and provides a collaboration portal that gives customers operational metrics and insights. IBM’s WebSphere server now integrates MessageSight and allows users to more quickly build and deploy web applications. IBM’s new Integration Bus will be able to extend data to mobile devices.

With those announcements, LeBlanc reiterated the importance of cloud construction that’s flexible, saying “You don’t want to build the next generation of legacy systems.”

Further, IBM was adamant in its advocacy of open architecture that will keep the source available for cloud services and software. IBM is pushing Message Queuing Telemetry Transport out as a standard and the company touted its work with HTML5 and Apache Cordova.

IBM also took time to introduce an updated WorkLight that will provide more insight to guide application development while still enabling lightweight builds, and reveal its new PureData system for Hadoop.

Throughout the fanfare—a lively brass band appeared between each presentation—IBM maintained its focus on putting mobile first. A number of guests, including Vijay Sankaran, the director of application development at Ford Motor Company, discussed the challenges that going mobile presented in their particular enterprises and how partnering with IBM proved beneficial for them in their personalized deployments.