Found an interesting article from Bob Evans in a recent InformationWeek - major financial firms are working up a cloud consortium to try and negotiate down some of their IT costs by pooling resources. Of course, we are familiar with this concept in government requisitioning, group payer negotiations for healthcare... but how will it work for IT?
"Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle"
True, if anyone has the clout to push the big software vendors to offer
them economies of scale, it's banks like Bank of America
and Deutsche Bank, and if this were going to happen anywhere, it would be in the Cloud. However, while there may be commonalities between large banks, in terms of the types of workflows and compliance issues they need to support, the enterprise software packages they are likely to be running are very seldom standard one size fits all applications.
I think like many seemingly disruptive changes, this strategy will have more utility for a new class of "shared utility" types of Cloud-based software that represents a small percentage of functionality that can be shared across global banks. This will be like a "toe in the water" to gauge the temperature for a bigger plunge later.
For more strategic operations, the inherent uniqueness of financial systems in different countries, and even global competition, will still require custom purchasing and large service contracts from the software giants, and the SIs that support them. I'll certainly be watching this story in the coming few months to see how it plays out.
