FutureTrade, a large financial services company, runs their stocking trading platform, back office and analytics applications on IBM middleware; WebSphere Application Server to serve requests, DB2 to handle transaction data, and MQ for messaging. FutureTrade’s applications are built as a traditional stack architecture and run on virualized hardware on premises. FutureTrade development teams release new features in six-month cycles. With financial services, customers increasingly want flexibility in how they access and work with funds. To remain competitive, FutureTrade must meet those expectations more quickly. That requires modernizing their applications; decomposing them into independent but connected smaller services.