Sell-Side Technology Awards 2020: Best Cloud Provider to the Sell Side—BT

The hybrid cloud model provides an opportunity for sell-side firms to mingle internal, public and private clouds, allowing flexible sharing of data. BT’s Radianz Cloud offers connectivity to all the major cloud providers and access to thousands of apps, which helped BT win the category for the best cloud provider to the sell side in this year’s SST Awards, taking the title from last year’s winner, Amazon Web Services.

Radianz Cloud, the telecoms giant’s connectivity and hosting platform for the capital markets, turns 20 this year. But it’s over the past year that the company has really seen an increase in interest in hybrid solutions, according to Michael Woodman, managing director for Radianz. “We are adapting our approach to support hybrid implementation and the policy requirements of our clients,” Woodman says. “They don’t just want one thing—they want to be able to mix and match to support particular use-cases.”

Over the past year, Radianz has expanded connectivity to the Google and Alibaba clouds, as well as its existing links to AWS and Microsoft Azure. It also added to the hundreds of applications and specialist services to which it provides access. In 2019, the company added 22 new providers, such as Hoptroff, which provides cloud-based software for time synchronization. “Over the past 12 to 15 months, we added more crypto applications, we added more alternative data applications, and we added applications to allow our customers to comply with regulation around the world,” says Yousaf Hafeez, head of business development at Radianz.

Radianz has also expanded its access into datacenters and is currently available in 30 datacenters across the globe, with eight locations added in the last year—a 27% increase. “We have allowed the sell-side community to connect to more partners in those datacenters through a fully managed solution,” says Hafeez.