Leading cloud CTRM vendor Aspect today reveals its innovative Any Cloud strategy, signposting the company's future direction in the market for commodity trade and risk management applications hosted in the cloud.
Currently Aspect solutions are available as either Aspect-hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) or hosted in user organizations' own private clouds. Soon support will be added for a third hosting option, public cloud, which employs third party cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Now Aspect's Any Cloud vision will take this one step further by giving customers themselves the choice of where their CTRM platform is hosted, where their data is stored, and who manages their operations.
The advance comes as user organizations increasingly are expecting greater choice of who provides and manages their IT services, of where and how those services are hosted, how the risk vs. cost equation is balanced, the level of security afforded and the ease of integration with other applications and services.
Aspect also plans to provide organizations with the automated tools required to operate and run these hybrid cloud environments, acknowledging the new discipline of DevOps which merges software development and infrastructure operations skills and where infrastructure effectively becomes code.
Once moved into Any Cloud customers will have the freedom to migrate between whichever cloud environment they choose, whenever they want, while selecting the level of security and the services appropriate to their business. They will also have more control over when software maintenance and updates take place.
The Any Cloud initiative is made possible by Aspect's unique designed-for-the-cloud, built-for-the-cloud architecture. Unlike other cloud ETRM and CTRM offerings that are developments of legacy technologies and rooted in packaged software and client/server models, Aspect's was made expressly for the cloud from day one when the company launched 15 years ago.
"We think our customers are the ones best placed to make proper, informed decisions about how they square the circle of speed to market, risk and cost," says Aspect CEO Steve Hughes. "That's why with Any Cloud we'll be giving them the power to make these decisions for themselves, and change them if necessary, rather than force them down a single cloud route."
"We've chosen to reveal Any Cloud today since we want trading firms to know that with Aspect their CTRM options are, and will always be, open."
