Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dan Raju, CIO Of TradeKing (Part 5)

Dan Raju: So, as I was saying, You have an extremely big change in the way customers are consuming services and that change began with the influx of mobility technologies to the site, which has completely disrupted the space. The second thing has to do with customers themselves, and they are requesting an entirely different way of interacting with online financial services in particular and in retail in general. Customers are looking for more, and they need specific components of a company’s services. In most cases, the customer does not really care about all the things my site provides.

If you have ever logged on to a brokerage sight or if you ever logged on to most of the retailers – I am sure you have – there are so many features available that sites have created a portal accumulation of each capability they provide. The next generation of customer is saying, Do want to come to your mother’s website and figure out how to navigate through all of that to know a specific component I want? I really want to go after a specific component. For example, in the brokerage industry, I know I am looking at this stock. I am following companies such as Apple and  Microsoft,  and those are the things I am going to follow, and if I am going to make a decision to trade only on them as he is always looking for the new genre of customers are basically point click customers. That is the reason apps are so popular. They take the cluster of these large websites and give access to a specific functionality. It’s the creation of a second genre that is taking place.

The third thing is, this new way of doing things is changing online retail in a fundamental way because the customer always assumes he is online, and he is online in front of his mobile device all the time. I am sure there is another reason. The modes of customer interaction thus must be simple, and services have to be quick to access. They are point-and-click, fragmented services that function in a highly mobile way. So, what we as customers have to do or we as service providers have to do is to adjust our platforms.

We also have to worry about scalability. How do you scale your website from this much capacity to what we estimate as this much capacity? Now as a whole, the most important question is, How do you scale your services not only to a website capacity, but how do you scale your services to an entire range of different interactive mobile features. With cloud sourcing location development, people want to write their own interfaces on top of your services, so that has created the need for providers like us to think about services differently.

Let me get into the landscape question. Particularly in the brokerage space, the landscape of providers are the people who have software. You have services that clear trades for you, you have services that provide market data for you. At the end you need to clear a trade and at the end you need market data, whether it is stock options or whatever data you need. Then you have tools that take this huge amount of data, crumble it, compartmentalize it, and build it back up in a way you can consume. So, you have market data tools, you have clearing services, you have what I call lead generation tools, and now you have an entire set of tools that are social media–related. The space is full of market data and trading execution tools, and this entire set of tools yield  insights either by looking at social media or looking at how people consumer market data. What is happening in the market is that tools provide data in the form of insight for you. That is largely at the upper end of the spectrum, and now all these tool providers have to take their services and compartmentalize that in a way so that people like us can provide service to our customers because these customers are looking for more fragmented, point-and-click services. I hope that this explanation makes sense. These changes have forced this industry to look at extremely small units of consumption that have very small payment units of consumption and determine how services can be fragmented in a way that people can consume them. So, the cloud and APIs are truly kicking into the space even as we speak.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. Next, we’ll talk more about these APIs.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dan Raju, CIO Of TradeKing
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