Trade show aisles are stuffed full of products that build software applications these days, serving every degree of customizability. Where one company may run a data center and craft its software from scratch, another might pick up some pre-built Legos and snap together an app in no time. Determining the level of prefabrication their software needs depends on their in-house skill levels and the considerations of time-to-value ratios, among other things.

“Software is invading almost every single industry,” said Don Boulia, general manager of cloud developer services at IBM Corp.

As all companies become software-driven, the more software skills their employees possess, the better off they’ll be. This does not mean every employee needs a degree in computer science. Vendors are increasingly putting together easy-to-use foundational services that lower the bar to software operation and development.

Boulia spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Innovation Day event in Yorktown Heights, New York. They discussed the increasingly agile stream of software from makers to users and the market for easy-to-use software. (* Disclosure below.)

End users ask for more, more, more as a service

Today’s software may originate in open-source communities or proprietary companies and reach users in a number of ways. Take Kubernetes, for example. It is an open-source platform for orchestrating containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications). IBM is one of a host of cloud service providers now packaging Kubernetes as a service.

“Within our own Kubernetes and container service … we push over 500 updates a week to that software stack on behalf of our customers,” Boulia said.

From container orchestration to self-serve artificial intelligence software, customers might choose Kubernetes as a service or IBM’s Watson AI platform because IBM subtracts a lot of legwork before hand. This makes it easier for them to get up and running with deployment and development, according to Boulia.

“The ability to tap into something like [Watson] with a couple lines of code in an hour as opposed to what would have taken months, years … and frankly would have been out of reach of most developers to begin with, is now something you can have somebody come in and do with a fairly low level of skill and get a good result on the outside,” Boulia concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Innovation Day event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Innovation Day event. Neither IBM, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE