In Reply to Rajesh Rajaratnam:
In the era of cloud computing, platforms, software and infrastructure that are available as services, everybody seems to be looking forward to a micro service architecture, rather than procuring expensive software products.
In this scenario, what do you think is the future of IBM’s software products?
The following is my own opinion. I think we will see more products moved to the IBM Cloud. This does not necessarily mean every product will be turned into a micro service just because the underlying architecture is based on micro services. Although applications built with a micro service architecture often expose an API, there is no requirement to do so. You could have a micro services based application that does not expose an API outside of the application itself. That would mean in a case like that it is still a full product, just delivered on IBM Cloud instead of purchased and installed locally by/for the client. I also don't think that the same application built on a micro service architecture versus a monolith architecture automatically implies that it will be less expensive, it really depends on each product offering. SaaS does look to be the way things are heading.