by Cloud9 | Dec 12, 2017 | Press Coverage
Behind Hedge Fund Billionaire Steve Cohen’s Fintech Investments
Read the original article by Serena Saitto in The Information.
The Information, an elite subscription-based technology news site, recently featured Cloud9 in a profile about the key strategic fintech investments made by Point72 Ventures. With a portfolio of companies that focus on future-forward methods and technologies such as SaaS, Big Data, AI, and Machine Learning, these investments all represent inside look into the future of trading for Point72 founder, Steve Cohen.
As part of the Point72 portfolio, Cloud9 represents next-generation trading floor communications, backed by the power of our unmatched transcription services plus trader voice data and analytics, which has never been available before in the market.
As we continue to explore new technologies and expand into new asset classes, Point72 provides valuable assistance in opening doors for new clients and advice on how to further improve our products.
Saitto writes of Cloud9:
” ‘They are strategic investors that can enable network effect,’ Gerald Starr, co-founder and CEO of Cloud 9, said of his investors, which include Point72, Barclays and JPMorgan.
Mr. Starr’s New York-based software company has so far raised $30 million in financing. Its cloud-based applications cost as little as $200 a month and are disrupting the specialized market of high-priced phones designed for traders on Wall Street. So far established in the commodities market, Cloud 9 now aims to penetrate other securities markets and, Mr. Starr said, he hopes Point72 and his other strategic investors will help with that ambition.”
Read the original article by Serena Saitto on The Information.
© Cloud9 Technologies 2021
All rights reserved.
by Cloud9 | Nov 17, 2017 | News, Press Coverage, Security & Compliance
Companies Are on the Hook for Cloud Safety
Cloud9’s accomplishment of obtaining both our
ISO 27001 and
SOC 2 certifications was recently recognized in Institutional Investor as an industry best practice for security in the cloud.
Read the full article by Jeffrey Kutler on Institutional Investor.
Kutler writes in the article:
“Cloud9 Technologies, which is using cloud systems to disrupt traditional approaches to trading-floor communications, obtained both the ISO 27001 certification (for information security management) and SOC 2. ‘It was a high bar for us,’ says Gerald Starr, chief executive officer of the three-year-old start-up. It sends a message that Cloud9 ‘aims high’ to instill users’ confidence in information protection.”
These certifications are a crucial show of credibility for fintech vendors, helping instill confidence in firms who are choosing to migrate their most sensitive data into the cloud. As the article points out, even though Cloud9 is using a highly secure and trusted cloud provider like Amazon Web Services, we are still responsible for creating infrastructures that protect the data of our customers as well as architecture for compliance. Achieving both the SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications – something no other trader voice communication provider holds – provides independent validation regarding our ability to protect the calls, voice recordings, call data, and business information that users entrust to Cloud9.
It’s a dangerous world out there for financial institutions, but the right partner can provide the best defense against security breaches.When considering a move to the cloud, it’s important for firms to take the time to find a trusted partner that is verified to protect them against cyber threats.
Read the article on Institutional Investor to learn more about how companies are working to secure the cloud.
© Cloud9 Technologies 2021
All rights reserved.
by Cloud9 | Jul 31, 2017 | News, Press Coverage
See the original article on Finance Magnates.
Cloud9 develops solution with Quantiphi and Google Voice that will help to transcribe traders’ voices within milliseconds.
Cloud9 Technologies, a cloud communications service provider that delivers voice and collaboration services for institutional traders, has announced the development of a voice trading transcription solution which deciphers trader talk.
For a long time, traders’ voices had been difficult to decipher due to their use of slang, their intermittent nature, and their use of difficult trading jargon. This is similar to the problem that is faced in highly specialised work environments like air traffic control, hospitals, etc.
But by using Google Open Source technology in collaboration with Quantiphi, the report says that Cloud9 technologies has been able to convert the complex trader voice into text. The company recently secured $30 million in funding and this development should please its investors.
German Soto Sanchez, Global Head of Corporate Development at Cloud9, said: “Today, PMs, traders, and analysts utilize only 5% to 10% of voice data for analysis – with Cloud9’s Voice Transcription Solution, they can now use 100%”.
The report goes on to add that a live demonstration was held among hundreds of representatives from major financial services firms and it was largely successful in converting all traders’ voices, complete with jargon, into text in a matter of milliseconds.
Conversion of the voices into text within milliseconds is a challenge which many existing transcribing solutions have failed to crack. This development from Cloud9 will help a great deal in moving to an advanced stage as far as compliance, surveillance and trader voice analytics goes.
Cloud9 believes that by pushing through with the adaptation of this breakthrough development, if and when that happens, the industry will be able to advance further in its quest for better compliance and trading standards which will only enhance the trading ecosystem as a whole.
See the original article on Finance Magnates.
by Cloud9 | Jul 28, 2017 | News, Press Coverage
See the full article on Institutional Investor.
Cloud9 Technologies partnered with Google and Quantiphi to build a machine learning-powered voice transcription service for traders.
For forty years, traders have called each other up to price potential transactions. Now, a fintech firm wants to turn those calls into market data.
Through a partnership with Google and data science firm, Quantiphi, New York-based Cloud9 Technologies has developed a transcription service that can translate verbal communications between traders into text data using machine learning. This data, the firm believes, can revolutionize compliance as well as offer new insights into trading activity.
“It’s going to be transformative for the industry,” said German Soto Sanchez, Cloud9’s Global Head of Corporate Development.
See the rest of the article from Institutional Investor.
by Cloud9 | Mar 28, 2017 | News, Press Coverage
German Soto-Sanchez, Global Head of Corporate Development at Cloud9, recently sat down with Benzinga to share an average day in his life, including some of his top productivity tips.
Read the Original Article on Benzinga
What’s a day in your life like as the Global Head of Corporate Development for Cloud9 Technologies?
5:15 a.m. — Wake up and read my daily affirmation from a book called “Jesus Calling.” Check email (only respond to urgent items) and check daily schedule. Then I head to the gym for some cardio. My gym is eight blocks away, so it takes some motivation to get there (especially when it is 10 degrees outside), but I always enjoy listening to my Birthday Playlist, which is made up of my favorite songs going as far back as my elementary school days!
7 — Arrive back at home in time to see my son off to school and my daughter, who we homeschool. I also have breakfast, which is the same each day — a shake and health bar.
8–8:15 — Leave for work. I live in Harlem, and I am a proud native New Yorker, so I take the subway every day. I normally use my commute to read the news. First I look at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for general news, then I move on to Bloomberg, Benzinga and CB Insights for financial and fintech news.
8:45–9 — The subway is always a little unpredictable, but I try to get to the office before 9 a.m.
9–9:15 — I plan my entire week on Sunday night, and then I reassess each night of the week, so I have a good idea of what my day and my week will look like when I arrive in the morning. I take the first 15 minutes to half hour of the morning to get my bearings and finalize my To Do List. Every day around this time I also fire up our flagship communications platform, the C9 Trader. I usually use it for calls with our partners.
9:15–12:30 p.m. — I reserve the first half of the day for meetings. I am usually meeting with various fintech companies or participating in one of several recurring touchpoint meetings for one of my teams. One example is the meeting for our transcription project. I love using the C9 Trader to conduct meetings—it’s transformed the way I communicate with our clients and partners. The call quality in our meetings with project team members (some of whom are in India) used to be terrible, so we set them up on the C9 Trader in a lab environment, which greatly improved the call quality and our level of interaction. Nowadays, a lot of our partners and vendors ask us for Cloud9 subscriptions in order to interact with us. The experience is that much better.
12:30–1 — My days tend to be very busy, so I always work through lunch.
1–2 — I’ll start the early afternoon by wrapping up any meetings I may have not gotten to in the morning.
2–7 — I like to reserve most of the afternoon for work — I may schedule or attend a meeting here and there (usually a “meet for tea” since I don’t drink coffee), but I like having this time to focus on work. Before the end of the day, I always completely clean out my inbox and make sure all those To Do List items are accomplished.
7–8:15 — I leave the office around 7 p.m. every day except for Fridays, when I leave a little after 6 p.m. to pick up my daughter from her ballet class. On a typical weekday, my son is off at tennis and my wife is taking my daughter to ballet, so I’m the only one home if I arrive before 8:30 p.m. My family likes my cooking, so I make dinner when I can.
8:15–9 — The kids and my wife start arriving home and we all sit around the table and eat. We tend to eat healthy meals — no-fats food and we don’t eat out a lot — but I always make a big, unhealthy brunch on weekends. Kids are in bed by 9 p.m.
11 — I check a few emails before bed and confirm or revise my schedule for the next day, but I prefer not to work from home at night. After spending some time with the family, I tend to go to sleep by 11 p.m. every night.
Read the Original Article in Benzinga
by Cloud9 | Feb 23, 2017 | News, Press Coverage, Thought Leadership
Set the stage for smart growth by reducing manual processes and championing automation on your DevOps team
As your business grows, it’s increasingly important to understand how to scale engineering processes and methodologies. The amount of time spent on setup, deployment and manually testing code is often ignored by technology teams and managers. Manual server configuration and code quality tests are not only error prone, but they ultimately result wasted time and money.
3 steps to automate software development
Introducing automation into your Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and infrastructure scaling projects is the most effective way to improve code quality and deployment velocity. These three steps will help you do that:
Implement a continuous integration strategy
Continuous integration (CI) is a development practice where code is checked into a code repository, tested and verified in an automated process. By regularly integrating changes into a centralized repository that is automatically tested for code quality, syntax errors and unit/integration test issues, errors can be detected and located more easily.
There are various continuous integration tools available—the most popular being Jenkins, Travis and TeamCity—and each offers benefits for different organizational use cases.
At Cloud9, we’ve adopted Jenkins as our continuous integration (CI) platform. All changes to shared code repositories are automatically picked up by Jenkins, which we’ve configured to run quality, syntax and unit tests on any new code that is committed. Builds that fail these tests will automatically notify the person who was responsible for the failed build and include the reason why it failed. This automated testing and deployment structure helps developers and engineers focus on creating exceptional code and sets the stage for smart technological growth.
Make code testing a shared responsibility
Developers and quality assurance (QA) share the same goal in the SDLC: delivering a quality product on time and on/under budget. To ensure cooperation and alignment towards this goal, developers should share the responsibility of quality testing.
Following the agile methodology, all members of my team (including development and QA) are responsible for testing code. Before a build even reaches the QA department for black-box testing, it has already been thoroughly tested, including unit and integration testing via a CI process. Load tests are performed to ensure race conditions are caught and mitigated, and smoke testing is performed automatically before the QA department is even involved.
From the moment a sprint is started to the time QA receives a qualified build, a constant stream of communication has already been established, ensuring QA knows exactly what to test, how to test it and what can go wrong.
Adopting a mentality of shared responsibility for testing reduces the number of obvious functional bugs that make it to QA, and it decreases the time to market for builds.
Implement the concept of infrastructure as code
Infrastructure as code (IAC) means writing code using a high-level language to manage the configuration and provisioning of infrastructure. This allows for quick and repeatable deployments of new application or web servers in your environment.
The concept of scripting infrastructure is not new, but IAC goes beyond basic scripting. By using a configuration management tool such as Puppet, Chef, Saltstack, or Ansible, changes in infrastructure can be written in a language that is consistent with the SDLC process at your company.
These tools enable teams to provision a server and spin up a new environment in minutes and also foster an environment of cooperation and innovation. Rather than leaving the process of server provisioning and configuration management to system administrators, any engineer can easily write infrastructure code and engage in the activities of the DevOps team
Implementing an IAC strategy eliminates infrastructure and configuration sprawl, decreases chances of outage-causing production changes, and ultimately saves your company time and money.
Going through these steps should make your company a lean, mean, rapidly scaling machine. But remember DevOps automation isn’t a one-shot effort—the whole process requires continuous monitoring and improvement. By continuously reevaluating your processes, you’ll be able to introduce additional automation over time.
See the original article on Network World.
