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Does every Cloud have a silver lining?
Infrastructure is expensive. Whether you’re a small IFA or an international financial services vendor it is likely your IT will devour a reasonable chunk of your annual budget. To make matters worse, Moore’s Law kicks in and you have to replace the whole shebang every 3-5 years. Ouch! But help is (apparently) at hand. The wonders of “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) and “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) promise to banish the woes of managing, maintain and upgrading racks of tin in a data centre – your server estate at least, will be replaced with a nice friendly and cost effective solution out on the Cloud that is someone else’s problem and that you can put down to OpEx. But is it all too good to be true, does this Cloud really have a silver lining?
Is there a place for SaaS in Financial Services?
Run a Google search on ‘IFA SaaS solutions’ and you won’t find much. In fact, our last blog post on the topic currently comes up top of the pile! However, change the search to ‘SaaS solutions’ in general and you’ll suddenly find a whole world of diverse products and providers. There may not be much on the market-specific SaaS plate right now, but SaaS is big and will continue to grow. This is for two simple reasons: software as a service (SaaS) is easy to buy and it is (usually) cost effective. It’s also the most established of the Cloud Computing space ‘as a service’ solutions (more on ‘infrastructure’ and “platform” as a service in upcoming articles).
Parting the Cloud to SaaS
IntelliFlo launched its IFA offering back in 2004 and are held high by many as the first to bring a “software as a service” (SaaS) solution to the adviser market. They are seen as the SalesForce.com of the financial software world taking on a brave new business model: chuck out traditional software licensing and delivery and allow an IFA to sign-up to use their product on a monthly basis all hosted “in The Cloud”.
Alexander Craig's blog 