ServiceMesh

Last week, the commercial technology division of the New York Stock Exchange launched the “Capital Markets Community Platform”, which they described as the first industry specific cloud platform tailored for the financial services industry. Among other capabilities mentioned, this new IaaS offering leverages NYSE Technology’s unique access to global market data and low latency connectivity to world-wide trading centers. Assuming they design their cloud infrastructure to be equally high performing, this could provide an enticing cloud environment for algorithm-based trading and other financial services applications.

Industry solutions are nothing new in the technology industry. Almost every major horizontal technology wave includes vertical market solutions at some point in their evolution. Some examples include Business Process Management (BPM), where many software vendors rolled out industry-specific business process templates, or Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), where collections of industry specific web services were licensed in packs or kits.

Do industry specific solutions like these deliver customer value? Certainly, although more specifically it depends on the quality of the pre-packaged assets, the relevance of the problems they solve, and the relative maturity of the customers adopting them. In general, they offer value by helping to accelerate the adoption and benefits of a new technology. That includes providing a trail for others to follow and reassurances that other industry players have (usually) done it before. At their very best, they have the potential to provide a framework for new competitive advantages.

Although pre-packaged industry solutions are rare in the cloud space today, this will change. Here’s a few potential offerings that could evolve:

• Specialized IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings
• Cloud marketplaces and brokers that package different vertical market solutions together
• Industry specific policies, approval processes, and governance patterns to better manage and control cloud implementations
• Cloud exchanges that co-located industry specific offerings in a common physical location for economies of scale and convenient assembly of complimentary offerings

Some of these solutions require a critical mass of customers and offerings to establish an effective marketplace and will take time. Others based on best practices and intellectual property will evolve faster. For example, ServiceMesh has made considerable strides in the area of business-level policies which are implemented in our Agility Platform to govern cloud workload deployment. Bundling up common policies for regulation-intensive industries can help those industry customers roll out cloud implementations faster and make sure they’re properly governed and managed.

Pre-built industry policies are useful, but only to the extent that the underlying software that implements them provides easy customization and extensibility. Every enterprise will want to tweak policies to their liking. More importantly, they’ll want to extend policy and governance frameworks to their company-specific and geography-specific uses as well.

The arrival of these industry solutions is a good sign. Its means the cloud marketplace is maturing, and that we’re innovating to deliver more customer value.  Expect them to increase in the future.