Eze Software's Keller on New Cloud Offering

Rob Keller, chief product officer of Eze Software Group, spoke with WatersTechnology about the rollout. 

How is this cloud framework different from your past offerings?
Today, we are already providing various SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offerings including RealTick EMS ─ a true cloud-based platform ─ and private hosting for both Eze OMS and Tradar PMS. We now have a new cloud-based platform onto which we will be iteratively rolling out new functionality over the course of the next several years.

Our fully managed, hosted data integration and interfacing solution has always set us apart as a service provider. The managed service offering itself has been around for a long time, but the technology behind it is new. Eze Data Services enables enterprise clients to manage transaction and security data in our secure, private cloud. Data can be transformed in the cloud to deliver highly customized transaction files to third parties.

What benefits will users experience as a result of Eze Data Services moving to the cloud? 
Users will experience all of the general benefits of cloud-deployed solutions, including reduced total cost of ownership, high accessibility and scalability, and minimized infrastructure requirements. Additionally, Eze Data Services will offer users a number of unique advantages, such as an intuitive user interface and advanced data visualization tools for transaction and security data.

Longer term, it provides a flexible framework for rolling out future features, such as advanced matching and confirmation workflows.

Can you provide two prime examples as to how users will be able to use this new functionality to improve on their own internal processes?
This initial module on our new cloud framework will provide functionality mainly for middle-office personnel. Users will benefit from high accessibility and scalability along with front-end visualization tools for more visibility into the communication of positions, trades, and securities at all stages (morning, afternoon, intraday). Additional functionality for portfolio managers is coming up on our roadmap.

It would seem that the broader trend underpinning this decision to turn to the cloud is that buy-side firms are becoming more comfortable with storing their data in a cloud run by third-party vendor. Is this fair to say? What was the driving force behind this move?
Clients are definitely becoming more and more comfortable with cloud-based solutions. We have many users on our industry leading RealTick EMS solution, and others who are moving their enterprise solution into a third-party or hosted facility. As our next-generation platform evolves over the next few years, we will continue to iteratively move functionality to the cloud to create a highly composable SaaS offering.

The announcement talks about how you have increased R&D spending by more than 25 percent. What other areas will you look to address using the cloud framework?
We have increased R&D spending for 2014 by 25 percent compared to 2013. In addition to executing on existing product roadmaps (Eze OMS, RealTick EMS, Tradar PMS) we are actively building out tighter, more robust integrations across our three core product lines.

For example, one project in development will enable clients to generate orders within RealTick EMS while leveraging the advanced compliance capabilities within Eze OMS, thus removing the requirement to stage orders into the EMS.

As we develop Data Services, we're actively building a framework that will enable us to systematically migrate select functionality of our product suite to our secure, private cloud. The plan is to quickly add new interfaces, workflows, and modules in 2014/2015.

Our new cloud framework has been designed to offer all the benefits of the SaaS model. Over the next several years, we will leverage the framework to iteratively roll out additional functionally on the cloud. This will be a multi-year, multi-phase evolution.