Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dan Raju, CIO Of TradeKing (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Well, if you are interested, you are much very welcome to do that with us as well. We have an entrepreneur community, and it is full of entrepreneurs who do things like these.

Dan Raju: I love that, and we will absolutely send the information to you; this will be great! We announced a campus challenge when we went [to the university in Maryland] and sent invitations to many universities, and we probably have 13 or 14 units that have expressed interest. We are announcing a cash prize for people who come up with the most innovative app, and we have a judging panel from academia, from the press, and also from a TradeKing [representative] called Trading Side who are going to make the decisions.  I would love to [have your community participate] if that would be helpful for you, Sramana, and it will be beneficial for them and obviously since we are in the business, it is beneficial for us. We have a category we are calling the open category, which it is not specific to the university.

SM: Great; I see many possibilities for things we might be able to do together because we are trying to help people build businesses in scaleable and sustainable ways, and I think some of these applications companies are going to respond based on what you said you are doing for your platform, and they should take advantage of that expertise of how to build businesses using applications and application ecosystems.

Do you have any other thoughts you want to share?

DR: One of the key angles. Sramana, is that we at TradeKing, ever since its inception, have had something written on our walls. That saying is, If you can’t innovate, what’s the point? So, at the end of the day what fuels us is innovation all the way from the social media. Social media is big part of our offering at this time, especially for the APIs we were just talking about right now. We pride ourselves on being one of the most innovative financial services and brokerage companies in the area of APIs. We are always thinking about who is is the most what aggressive, innovative, and creative brokerage firm. We really aspire to be on top of that, so part of all of this has been driven by this desire.

SM: Yes, and the strategy you are following, that is, opening up your API and supporting an ecosystem of developers to build on your platform . . . that is a strategy that also requires the players and the ecosystem that surround you to be viable businesses themselves. We don’t want students who do something for fun and then disappear because there is nobody else to support that application.

DR: Right, and we have great points. We have what I call a validation structure by which we incorporate those players with some amount of due diligence into our platforms. But absolutely, at the end of the day we fundamentally believe that if we encourage and facilitate an equal system of entrepreneurship on top of our core platform, in addition to the growth possibilities it provides us, it provides an entire set of capabilities, tools, and experiences to our customers which we by ourselves could never do.

SM: Very good. I very much enjoyed this story.

DR: Thank you, Sramana.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dan Raju, CIO Of TradeKing
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