I celebrated our nation’s birthday by drinking copious amounts of various American whiskeys: Breuckelen Distilling’s 8-year 77 Whiskey (Brooklyn); Copper Fox’s peachwood American single malt (Virginia); Interboro’s black label (Brooklyn); McCarthy’s 3-year single malt (Oregon); St. George Spirits’ Baller single malt (California); Smoke Wagon small batch bourbon whiskey (Nevada); Van Brunt Stillhouse’s Campfire (Brooklyn); Wyoming Whiskey’s Outryder. All were outstanding. God bless America.

So it is that the synapses aren’t firing this week quite the way they should. With that said (or written), I did want to briefly talk about developments in and around the cloud and the capital markets.

Recently, Reb Natale wrote about a new company started by a fella named Nick Kolba. He was a key architect on Thomson Reuters’s Eikon platform, and he led the creation of the FDC3 protocol while at OpenFin. FDC3, as you may know, is the open standard used by those in the desktop app interoperability space.

For his next trick, Kolba is looking to move beyond the desktop and into the cloud. As Reb writes, his startup, Connectifi, will allow applications to “talk” to one another and work in sync, and users can build their own custom workflows. But in a significant departure from the way this is usually done, Connectifi will utilize the cloud (and allow for mobility) instead of a desktop container, such as Electron. From the story:

Kolba was inspired, in part, by the industry’s push toward the cloud, which accelerated through the rise of remote working and by targeted offerings from Big Tech firms such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

“Interop benefits from web tech because it puts everything on an equal footing, and you have less fragmentation in the technology stack. But at the same time, the way it’s implemented today means you end up with another fragmentation across different container platforms,” Kolba says. “What I wanted to do was create interop that’s not platform-dependent, not desktop-dependent, not container-dependent, not install-dependent; that can run anywhere; and that’s truly native to the web and truly native to the cloud.”

The ways in which financial technology is developed and delivered are rapidly changing. The idea of desktop app interoperability is still in its relative infancy. But Kolba sees an opportunity to already move beyond this particular brand of tech development by leveraging the cloud for app interop. I fully expect that the likes of OpenFin, Cosaic and Glue42 to move down this path in the near future (if they haven’t begun already). 

While the cloud is hardly new to us and our smartphone-dominated consumer world, the matchmaking between trading challenges and cloud solutions is. To illustrate the industry’s increasingly cloudy skies, I put together a list of some of the big cloud projects that have either been completed over the last 30 months, or that are currently underway. It’s by no means an exhaustive list—simply a snapshot, but hopefully a robust one. (All links lead to our coverage. Obviously, you can go to other outlets to read about other projects—it’s just that other stories won’t be as well-sourced and detailed as ours. Fact.)

Sometimes it’s easy to write “The industry is rapidly moving to the cloud,” and state it as a fact. I mean, it is a fact, but the statement is often lacking a tangible picture of that migration. But in true Nineteen Eighty-Four fashion, the problem is that if something is stated as fact often enough, whether true or not, it becomes fact.

An example: “Blockchain will revolutionize the capital markets!” Well, where’s the proof? See what I’m getting at? When this happens—to steal from another famous book—senior technologists and data professionals start tilting at windmills.

Cloud is the revolution, and the proof is below. The key for developers is to read the tea leaves and understand what that next evolution will be. That’s what Kolba’s doing. Since I am not an oracle, I have no idea whether he will be successful or not. But I do believe that his instincts are dead-on.

If you’re working on something new in the cloud space that I have not mentioned below, feel free to reach out. The reason I’ve stayed at WatersTechnology so long is because I love talking to people that have big ideas about how tech development can be improved, and the list below is just scratching the surface: anthony.malakian@infopro-digital.com.

* Bank of Montreal intends to move 30% of its workflows across the bank to the cloud within three years. All future tools developed by the bank will be cloud-native. (Link)

* Bloomberg offers a hosted solution with a private cloud offering, but it also connects with AWS and Azure. (Link)

* Broadridge is moving its distributed architecture over the next couple of years into a private cloud it is building with IBM. (Link)

* Charles River recently signed an agreement with AWS, thus making its product offering multi-cloud compatible, as it already uses Azure. (Link)

* CME Group is moving its tech infrastructure to Google Cloud. (Link)

* FactSet recently became the first major data vendor to deliver a ticker plant completely in the cloud. (Link)

* Fidelity’s asset management division is going all in with AWS as it has migrated nearly 99% of its trading applications to the cloud and is on track to sunset all on-premises datacenters soon. (Link)

* Google, beyond being a major cloud provider, is taking aim at corporate actions by taking advantage of its AI capabilities. (Link)

* Golden Source is containerizing its application and moving towards a serverless set up to take advantage of elastic compute. The cloud migration project is expected to be completed in early 2023. (Link)

* Goldman Sachs has announced several major cloud initiatives along with AWS, and all new tools and functionality added to its Marquee platform are built as cloud applications. (Link)

* HPR recently rolled out a new market data distribution platform called Databot, which can be delivered via an FPGA or as a software-based cloud solution. (Link)

* IHS Markit is leveraging AWS’s cloud to power its new buy-side derivatives risk modeling platform. (Link)

* Linedata started rolling out its first wave of cloud-based and cloud-enabled offerings in 2020, including its new asset management platform, a.k.a. AMP. (Link)

* Man Group has built an internal cloud on OpenStack infrastructure and container orchestration system Kubernetes, rather than turning to the public cloud. (Link)

* Nasdaq will use AWS as it moves its entire tech stack to the cloud, beginning with its matching engine for US options markets. (Link)

* Proof is a startup, cloud-native broker that was founded by executives from IEX. (Link)

* RBC has moved about 600 applications to the cloud, with 80% of those running on a private cloud architecture. (Link)

* Refinitiv is sunsetting its Eikon and Thomson One platforms in favor of its new cloud-based “Workspace” collaboration platform. (Link)

* RQD, a startup, is aiming to reimagine post-trade clearing with its new cloud-based platform. (Link)

* Singapore Exchange is partnering with DataBP to create an online portal for market data licensing and data usage monitoring. (Link)

* SmartStream decided two years ago to rewrite its entire solutions suite into cloud-native software. The vendor had previously released cloud-native versions of its Aurora and its SmartStream Air platforms. (Link)

* Societe Generale’s Americas division is using AWS and Azure to close its datacenters in the US as a result of moving to the cloud. (Link)

* SS&C Advent is looking to transition its Geneva, Moxy and APX platforms to the cloud following the launch of its cloud-native Genesis platform. (Link)

* Symphony switched from AWS to Google Cloud because the former was too expensive for the communications and workflow platform provider. (Link)

* UBS is turning to containerization for its cloud dev ops and security strategy as the bank has moved 33% of workloads to the cloud. (Link)

* Xignite released a suite of cloud microservices for data management, storage and distribution in the cloud. (Link)

The image accompanying this column is “Panoramic View of the Alps, Les Dents du Midi” by Gustave Courbet courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s open-access program.