Platform’s survey of senior IT executives at 35 leading financial services firms highlights that cost reduction (54%) and meeting the increased risk management need (23%) are the primary reasons for banks to invest in HPC solutions in 2009. This highlights how banks recognize the benefits of HPC to improve capacity/utilization of existing assets and use of virtualization, especially in the wake of the financial crisis. Interestingly, virtualization is the ‘watch-word’ for banks in 2009 as it is considered the infrastructure priority by the majority of banks (54%) in 2009 compared to HPC (17%), cloud computing (14%) and SOA (12%). 

 

With regards to cloud computing, the majority of respondents (51%) said they didn’t think that 2009 would be its year. Along with the 31% that didn’t know, the respondents cited 2010 as the year of cloud computing. What is preventing firms from adopting cloud computing is the fact it is at early stage adoption (29%) and also because it is still an ill-defined term (29%). Security (17%) was then cited as the next major barrier for adoption, especially as banks look to external clouds, and lack of management buy-in (9%).

 

 “With the changes happening across the financial services industry coupled with the many IT terms being thrown around, it is sometimes challenging to differentiate what is hype from the real infrastructure priorities of banks,” said Jim Mancuso General Manager and Head of Financial Services Business Unit, Platform Computing. “Our delegate survey has helped to shed light on the fact that virtualization is a key technology priority in 2009, cloud computing is still in its infancy but will become more widely adopted in 2010, and that HPC continues to grow from strength to strength as it optimizes existing assets to support ‘more from less’ approaches to IT.”

 

Notes to editor:

*Survey of 35 IT managers at Tier 1 banks completed at CityGrid (equivalent to a third of the delegates in attendance). For more information on CityGrid: http://web.incisive-events.com/fit/2008/12/city-grid/index.html

 

 

Platform Computing provides software that dynamically connects IT resources to workload demand according to business policies. Over 2,000 of the world’s largest organizations rely on our solutions to improve IT productivity and reduce data center costs. Platform has strategic relationships with Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, and SAS. Building on 16 years of market leadership, Platform continues to help data centers be more efficient, responsive and dynamic.

Platform Computing

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Alexandra Kedward

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