Financial IT Spotlight's Most Recent Posts

In my last two articles, the context has been the opportunities and challenges that financial institutions (FIs) have with implementing private clouds successfully. But what about public clouds?

In the world of enterprise computing, Big Data isn't a choice anymore -- it's the new reality.

Digital content is expected to grow to 2.7 zetabytes this year, according to a recent IDC projection. Ninety percent of that information will be unstructured web-based content such as videos, text files and social media.

(Part 2 of a 2 part series) The most obvious candidates for cloud technologies would be the proven ones such as email, intranets and collaboration tools. A second opportunity is to place less back-office systems into the cloud as well as 'development' and 'test' environments.

In today's market, traders need every second to execute trades and lock in profits. With trillions of trade opportunities in the market every day, the most critical front-line tools for taking advantage of those opportunities are traders' proprietary algorithms. "Algos," as they're called, automatically execute trades based on pre-programmed criteria. They can process millions of trades in seconds, predict market movements, take advantage of arbitrage opportunities, speculate on trends and otherwise do whatever programmers design them for.

In spite of the benefits, there are a number of challenges to adoption of the cloud by financial institutions. Some will work themselves out over time, but some are structural and will need to be addressed by the FI's themselves.

Last week, the Oracle Financial Services Global Business Unit (GBU) released operating results for the first half of FY2012. Frank Brienzi, Senior Vice President of the GBU, S. Ramakriskhnan who leads OFSA Analytics and Don Russo who runs the Insurance sector all spoke enthusiastically of its performance, key wins in core banking, analytics, and insurance sectors, and recent innovation in OFSA/Exadata integration.

In a Q&A with Otis Spunkmeyer's Joel Feldman, the financial planning director describes path to a cloud-based offering that works better for it.

At a cookie-maker, of all places, I found a good case of finance and IT collaborating on a major tech decision.