Cloudsoft, a provider of multi-cloud applications management software, has moved OpenGamma into the cloud to offer an analytics and risk management service that is flexible and dynamic, and can be shared across a financial institution.
The company’s initial work with OpenGamma – both Cloudsoft and OpenGamma are open source specialists – was a response to a global investment bank’s request for a demo of Cloudsoft’s Application Management Platform (AMP) showcasing a global service across multiple regions and including in-region elasticity. The company chose to work with OpenGamma on the demo and is now running a proof of concept at the bank, ahead of commercialising the solution.
Duncan Johnston-Watt, founder and CEO at Cloudsoft, explains: “There is interest on both sides to commercialise AMP for OpenGamma, so both companies will invest to develop the solution and provide more options on how OpenGamma is deployed and configured. We expect to finalise this and commercialise the solution before the end of this year.”
A move into the cloud was in OpenGamma’s plans, but finding it difficult in the short term to resource a development project, working with Cloudsoft has extended the company’s analytics and risk management platform into the cloud. Jim Moores, chief technology officer at OpenGamma, says: “OpenGamma is componentised. In the past, the platform’s resources were dedicated, but Cloudsoft allows them to be virtual. Cloudsoft adds infrastructure to OpenGamma, a management layer that can, for example, detect a machine failure and bring up a replacement running OpenGamma. It can also manage and allocate cloud resources depending on use in different regions.”
Johnston-Watt adds: “This simplifies the management of OpenGamma. We are good at managing application infrastructure and matching it to cloud resources, so we can orchestrate the delivery of different parts of OpenGamma to different locations and deal on demand with any issues of scale.”
To meet the needs of OpenGamma users, Cloudsoft includes application programming interfaces (APIs) designed to request cloud services from a wide variety of environments. At the moment, the company is testing deployment of the OpenGamma cloud service on the Google Cloud Platform, HP Cloud, Softlayer Cloud and Interoute Virtual Data Centre. The aim is to allow these environments to be mixed and matched, perhaps to leverage different cloud service providers in different geographies or to avoid dependency on a single supplier.
With the OpenGamma cloud service, which is based on version two of OpenGamma that was released this summer, expected to be available in the market later this year, Cloudsoft is holding similar conversations with other independent software vendors (ISVs). Johnston-Watt says: “We are keen to partner ISVs with high value applications and create new offerings – not just an application management platform for apps, but packages customers can set up and run with minimum effort.”
Beyond individual solutions for individual banks, Johnston-Watts suggests a logical extension of Cloudsoft’s solution could be a service offering to many banks run over a managed network such as BT Radianz.
