Building applications that will reside in the cloud—particularly complex commercial applications that will be sold to financial services companies—requires some careful consideration. With questions lingering about the cloud’s readiness to satisfy the financial services industry’s stringent requirements in the areas of security, reliability and performance, it’s critical that software-as-a-service offerings be built with these perceived limitations in mind.
That’s exactly how Laurentiu Vasiliu focused his team’s energy in building the suite of services his startup company, Peracton Ltd., launched earlier this year. Those services—based on algorithms Vasiliu and his team helped write while on staff at the National University of Ireland Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute—are able to identify the mutual funds that best fit a customer’s investment profile in a matter of seconds.
The idea behind Peracton’s service is two-fold. It speeds up the process of determining the best investment vehicles for a financial customer, thus replacing a manual process that has involved using Excel spreadsheets to categorize thousands of mutual funds, each conforming to more than 20 investment parameters. It also is designed to show, with mathematical precision, exactly why a particular fund was chosen, an important consideration in a highly regulated industry.
As tricky as the application sounds, building it as a cloud service made things even trickier. It had to work across vast geographies and networks as if it were running on a server in the next room—something Vasiliu demonstrated in a demo for customers on both coasts of the U.S. while he was in North Africa and the software was running on servers in Ireland.
Not surprisingly, Vasiliu has emerged from the experience of developing the service with some pretty clear ideas of things software designers need to consider when building cloud-based applications.
Peracton’s work to make the technology cloud-compliant started with the graphic user interface. Vasiliu knew the tendency of developers is to build applications that look great, but he decided his team should take a different approach, keeping the interface basic so as not to have the network get bogged down trying to serve up snazzy images and design elements. “If the graphic interface looks great but is slow, what’s the point?” asks Vasiliu.
The next issue was configurability, a crucial element of a service that would be sold primarily as a “white label” component of a service integrator’s integrated solution. Highly configurable cloud applications can require that as much as 60 percent of the software be reworked in order to achieve desired configurations. Vasiliu wanted Peracton’s service to lower the burden on IT teams by ensuring that re-configurations only require reworking 5 percent to 10 percent of the core software.
Then, of course, there was the matter of addressing the admittedly stringent security requirements of a target market of institutional customers that may not yet be confident about exchanging sensitive financial data in the cloud. Vasiliu and his team made sure their software was designed to work with the most popular and accepted security system protocols. But during the design, when it became clear that the embedded security schemes for protecting transmitted data might not meet the requirements of some institutions, the service was tweaked to enable it to tap the most popular protocols for negotiating firewalls, as well.
Even with the interface, configurability and security addressed, Vasiliu is well aware that he’s still dealing with what is perhaps the most cloud-averse industry. Despite financial services companies’ growing comfort with packaged integrator offerings that feature white label services such as Peracton’s, Vasiliu still has chosen to exercise caution when using the “cloud computing” terminology of which financial services executives are so wary.
“Even though our software is in the cloud, I’m careful not to use the buzzwords, and instead say we have a web-based application,” he says. In fact, Peracton’s service is available in both cloud-based and on-premise versions.
For the short term, Vasiliu expects to have to dance around the topic of the cloud while the industry continues getting accustomed to the idea of placing data-intensive apps in the cloud. But he’s confident that as developers grow savvier about what financial services companies require from cloud services, and as network capacity increases, the uncertainty Peracton encounters in the market today will fall away. “In five to seven years,” Vasiliu says, “the path to the cloud will get clearer.”