IBM Keeps Revving

[Within an] SOA, your applications act as services and can be mixed and matched to meet the needs of your business process. In practice, customers have acquired lots of applications that have proved redundant. SOA is about simplification. How do I eliminate the redundancies around applications I have bought or built?

We have put our money into the technologies that support SOA. So you see us do acquisitions like Webify, which helps customers identify reusable application components and helps them understand how they can logically be connected together.

Let's end by talking about Steve Mills for a moment. You're already running the equivalent of a Fortune 500 company. Isn't CEO, either at IBM, or elsewhere, the logical next career move?

That's not what I get out of bed thinking about. I'm a 33-year IBM vet, and since the late '80s, I've been involved in building the software business. When I came there were about 4,000 of us; today there are about 44,000.

Nobody has more fun than I do. I love to build things. My hobby is home reconstruction and building. IBM provides me with a great opportunity to build things every day. I wouldn't have that opportunity anywhere else.

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