Microsoft refers to private clouds as a “temporary inevitability”. Temporary needs to be defined; in the case of the Financial markets, temporary could mean 10 years or more. GreenKey, like Symphony, offers "private pods". Although, unlike Symphony, GreenKey's design allows all components to be installed on-premises, either on a private cloud or a physical box. More technically, our pods are one or more containers that share storage, network and scripts for when and how to run GreenKey’s voice collaboration and transcription services.
Containerized offerings essentially isolate applications and allow processes to “cooperate” on the same OS, forming a more cohesive unit of service that makes application deployment, scaling and monitoring easy. Besides the ease of use, containerized on-premises deployments increase transparency and security by allowing full application process and resource monitoring to occur, plus everything is installed behind the customer’s firewalls. No doubt public clouds have many benefits too, mainly decreased cost, but you typically trade control and transparency for those savings. Since banks value control and transparency more than cost savings, at least for now, solutions providers need to be able to offer both!
Offering both a public cloud and on-premises deployment of your software can be extremely challenging! GreenKey was designed and built from the ground up with the mandate that private installs were an absolute requirement. We wouldn’t allow ourselves to entirely depend on AWS to solve problems for us. Offering “telecom and transcription in a box”, without leveraging cloud providers forced us to build world class software. We knew calling Google to ask how to improve transcription accuracy wouldn’t impress our customers. The buck needed to stop at GreenKey. We needed to up our game!
Maybe we are unique because we deal with ultra-sensitive audio conversations and transcriptions? Perhaps banks will move to the public cloud faster with less sensitive data? I don’t know. But I do know that putting trader voice communication and transcription on a public cloud today is a non-starter for nearly every bank globally. The market is telling me that banks need to start with private clouds first before using public clouds, if ever. If you are another Fintech founder, when designing your solution I would encourage you to consider the containerized deployment of your solution a must, so you can support private pods for large enterprise customers. I suspect “temporary inevitability” will be a long time. For more information please visit www.greenkeytech.com or contact us.
Anthony Tassone is a trader, angel investor and entrepreneur. He is the founder of GreenKey, a communication platform designed to unlock value in voice. GreenKey provides the world's largest banks with voice collaboration software and transcription capabilities. GreenKey is where voice becomes data for the financial markets. GreenKey recently joined the Foundation as a Silver Member.