Reflections from Capital Markets Cloud Symposium

This last Tuesday, I had the pleasure of presenting at the Capital Markets Cloud Symposium in Manhattan, New York. In attendance there were hundreds of CIO’s, CTO’s and executives from some of the world’s largest financial services firms like JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Bank of America and Credit Suisse. The presentations and conversations confirmed many things we’ve seen happen lately in the overall market but there were also a few surprises. Highlights:
1. Cloud is definitely happening in financial services. Every firm that I spoke with has a cloud initiative either underway or are about to start one.
2. Development and Test are the biggest drivers for these clouds. Why?
- They are the largest consumers of compute resources and have the greatest needs for elasticity.
3. Financial services firms are thinking in terms of private rather than public clouds - and security is the reason. While there were some debates about whether or not the security issues were real and the timing of adopting public clouds, there was general agreement that financial services firms are not going to the public cloud anytime soon.
4. The primary drivers for the move to cloud are agility and time to market, not cost savings. This view was widely held and surprising to me.
5. While the private cloud infrastructure (storage, compute, virtualization and management) seems well underway, people are still struggling with what applications to run on their clouds, how to automate them and how to integrate them with existing systems. This, of course, was music to my ears as it is precisely the problem that ElectricCommander solves and why I was there to talk about it in the first place.