The use of container technology to fold one area of IT into another, and into another yet, is a game-changing process for tech professionals and vendors alike. The main benefits of consolidating technology through containers and application program interfaces include the democratization of development — making development easier for those without specialized skills — and the shortened timeline for an app to go live. This new paradigm is freeing companies to shift more attention to profitable applications; in other words, the apps are the business now.

IBM Corp. is in the middle of its own consolidation efforts, having recently announced plans to sunset SoftLayer (IBM’s cloud Infrastructure as a Service) offering into IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform. Jason McGee, IBM Fellow, VP and CTO of the IBM Cloud Platform, says it’s all in the name of getting more value into a smaller package, which is what customers want.

“I think the whole phenomenon around containers and microservice-based development is a step function in speed of development,” he told John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the IBM World of Watson event.

On the topic of the industry’s new compositional model in app development, McGee explained: “If you’re building something new, you’re going to build it with containers and microservices and APIs and connecting APIs together,” McGee said. “All the [artificial intelligence] stuff we’re doing in Watson? Try to do that five years ago. And now it’s an API call.”

Revenge of the nerds: Techies invade the C-suite

McGee, Furrier and Vellante  agreed that developers are coming out of the back rooms and into the boardrooms, with an understanding of enterprise problems and how to solve them.

“I think the emergence of that persona is actually kind of a manifestation of the complexity of building these solutions going down,” McGee said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM World of Watson 2016.

*Disclosure: IBM and other companies sponsor some IBM World of Watson segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

https://youtu.be/jErVb08OtRM

Photo by SiliconANGLE