Cloud9’s President, Greg Kenepp, was recently interviewed by Fierce Finance IT, you can read the story here. Greg discussed how he, and Cloud9’s cofounders are reshaping critical business communications for the trading space. “That technology was invented 40 years ago and hasn’t changed much from when it was first introduced,” says Greg Kenepp, president of Cloud9 Technologies.
- Some highlights from the article include:
- Cloud9, which launched in the market in the third quarter of 2014
- The platform is currently used by 2,000 traders in 19 countries
- Cloud9 can reduce trader voice costs by as much as 50 percent
Cloud9 leverages cloud-based technology originally developed by Google called WebRTC, and is hosted on Amazon Web Services. “That’s a huge point of differentiation between how we do it and how it has historically been done. Historically it has always been telecommunications products and hardware,” Kenepp says.
Rather than a turret system on trader desktops, Cloud9 puts an application on their desktops, and traders can communicate using microphones and speakers that plug into their computers.
Kenepp says a cloud-based trader communications system offers several advantages, a key one being cost. He says trader voice services are the third largest expense line item on the trading floor behind salaries and market data.
As a digital, open-source technology, Cloud9 also integrates seamlessly with trade reconstruction technology. With traditional telecommunications-based calling, Kenepp says, trade reconstruction technology vendors report that they often stored voice recordings separately rather than fully correlating calls with other trade data.
“One compliance conversation that we have with all the banks is the cloud and what you have to do to deliver a high available service in the cloud while meeting the bank’s security and compliance requirements,” Kenepp says. “That’s a very active topic and each of the banks is at a different place in terms of their readiness to adopt cloud technologies.”
