Emerging Technologies and the Advantages they Offer Early Adopters

Participants:

• Carol Dow, principal, Vanguard Information Technology
• David Saul, chief scientist, State Street: 
• Patrick Angeles, chief architect, financial services, Cloudera 
• Todd Gottula, executive vice president and CTO, Advent Software 
• Oskar Mencer, CEO, Maxeler Technologies
• Roji Oommen, managing director, Financial Services, CenturyLink
• Anthony Tassone, CEO, Green Key Technologies

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What technologies that you see in the capital markets do you believe fall under the "emerging technologies" moniker?

Carol Dow, principal, Vanguard Information Technology: Technology innovations continue to emerge at a rapid pace and we at Vanguard see some great opportunities to take advantage of these changes to enhance our service model. Today our main focus is on leveraging cloud-based initiatives, big data, mobility, unified communication, and virtualization.
We see cloud computing-infrastructure-, platform-, and software-as-a-service-as a key technology initiative that will enable IT to lower its capital expenses through more efficient utilization of hardware and software infrastructure, and reduce its labor costs through the self-servicing and automation of the environment provisioning and deployment processes.
Big data solutions such as crowdsourcing, data fusion and integration will help us efficiently process large amounts of data within tolerable times. Visualization technologies will help us better communicate complex information in understandable terms. This can aide in decision making as well as better communication to our clients.
Vanguard's Enterprise Mobile Program ensures Vanguard Crew (our term for employees), clients, and prospects have secure access to Vanguard resources anytime, anywhere, from any device. Enhancements in mobility provide Crew with greater flexibility in the way they perform their responsibilities, so they can better serve our clients.
Unified communications (UC) is the integration of real-time communication services, such as instant messaging, presence information, telephony, video and web conferencing, and data sharing, along with variety of collaboration platforms. UC is not necessarily a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent, unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types. Enhanced communication techniques are an enabler of our global efforts.
Virtualization provides sufficient, cost-effective technology and workspace recovery solutions by implementing a centralized architecture, providing mobility by accessing data anywhere, addressing security concerns by having no data in-office or on end-points, and, lastly, improving performance for offices with latency challenges.

Oskar Mencer, CEO, Maxeler Technologies: There is a recent initiative driving the deployment of a new kind of computing ─ spatial computing ─ via an industry standard, led by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group. For more information, see openspl.org, and the video under What-is-OpenSPL.
There is also convergence of trading and risk, as described in this article: openmarkets.cmegroup.com/7372

"The cloud as a foundational technology has been maturing and the piece that I've seen that has been changing over the past year-and I expect we'll see even more of it over the next two years-is people viewing the cloud not just as a low-cost hardware platform, but also looking at the benefits that it provides to agile development." - David Saul, chief scientist, State Street

Todd Gottula, executive vice president and CTO, Advent Software: Companies have realized that running their own hardware is too expensive and carries too much risk, which is driving them to explore ways to get out of their datacenters. This trend translates into firms more actively pursuing cloud adoption for both legacy and new solutions.
A second category of emerging technology comes from a similar attitude of "not in my house." For traditional productivity applications, companies no longer want to manage all the upgrade installations, data privacy, or the compliance aspects as locally installed software. This push to outsource has gotten firms that have historically wanted to keep everything in-house to start to adopt basic cloud technologies. 
Finally, there has been a continued decline in firms wanting to build their own technology; they want to buy solutions from trusted technology providers. When they buy solutions, they're looking for easy, flexible, and configurable technologies, and as a provider we have to make sure we still give them the freedom to make the solutions that they want without having to build them themselves.

Patrick Angeles, chief architect, financial services, Cloudera: The success of Apache Hadoop-initially in internet-scale companies such as Yahoo and Facebook-has now drawn the attention of big, established players from the financial services industry. Big data exists in virtually every industry, and capital markets is no exception. Increasingly, large financial institutions are adopting the Hadoop platform for capturing and storing all kinds of data and to work with it in more ways. Hadoop can run a wide range of sophisticated, powerful analyses to extract insights and information from data at a scale that was simply unavailable using any other prior technology.
Cloudera has driven more capabilities and power into the Hadoop platform than any other company. Cloudera-powered enterprise data hubs (EDHs) based on Apache Hadoop are in production in 65 percent of the Fortune 500 in finance, telecommunications, retail, internet, insurance, energy, healthcare, biopharmaceuticals, networking, and media.

David Saul, chief scientist, State Street: The cloud as a foundational technology has been maturing and the piece that I've seen that has been changing over the past year ─ and I expect we'll see even more of it over the next two years ─ is people viewing the cloud not just as a low-cost hardware platform, but also looking at the benefits that it provides to agile development.
The cloud is a natural match for agile development. I don't think you can really do agile development if you are having to stand-up a traditional server environment.

Anthony Tassone, CEO, Green Key Technologies: Paying for shared resources based on usage has been around for decades, but cloud computing in its current form has just emerged. Although admittedly biased, I believe hosted VoIP in particular is dramatically changing the way brokers and traders communicate. VoIP for business is becoming more application-based, transitioning from clumsy analog hardware systems to software in the cloud. Application-based telephony allows for much greater flexibility that improves turn-up time, mobility and disaster-recovery capabilities. I believe the next stage in telephony evolution is for hosted PBX and VoIP to co-exist, which will allow voice, data, video, chat, file-sharing and screen-sharing to run on a single application, simplifying the traders' work flow and providing a much more integrated ecosystem.

Roji Oommen, managing director, Financial Services, CenturyLink: While we are past the point of classifying cloud as an emerging technology, we expect our clients will continue to transition to a cloud-based model. As such, we have focused our development efforts around cloud IT consumption.
Over the past few years, the focus in capital markets has largely been on software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), but we think platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is a very interesting framework for cloud consumption and deployment as well. Our clients are looking for rapid development of native cloud applications, reusable components and modules eliminating redundancies, and standardized application programming interfaces (APIs), all of which help them drive down costs and reduce time to market. Through a series of investments in technology, people and resources, we believe CenturyLink Technology Solutions is well positioned to respond to the needs of our clients and emerging technologies. CenturyLink Cloud supports an industry-leading range of development frameworks, leveraging Cloud Foundry and Iron Foundry.
Longer term, we think the concept of application-defined infrastructure is hugely compelling. We are working with some very interesting firms in this arena that share our view that infrastructure is a necessary component to enabling their applications and data, and allowing those applications to invoke and shape infrastructure and resources is the wave of the future.