Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Skip Smith, COO of Confluence (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Do they belong to the Boston group?

Skip Smith: No. I can’t say where they are based, but it is west of the Mississippi.

SM: Tell me more about this Boston pocket of entrepreneurs. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Vishnu Bhat, VP and Head of Cloud Services at Infosys (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Seeing that hybrid cloud trend, in general, what functions and workloads are on private cloud, and which ones are on the public cloud?

Vishnu Bhat: What we see is a trend of evolution. We see a trend of hybrid cloud evolution, and we believe that every client has to evolve its own cloud ecosystem. This is a combination of private and public cloud infrastructure. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Skip Smith, COO of Confluence (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: And they don’t have mature markets and trading platforms.

Skip Smith: And the data is kept in spreadsheets. There is no enterprise system that is housing this data. You have all these sources of manually created data, which we know has errors in it, and it gets aggregated into the central source. I think that is going to be critical [to find a different way]. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Vishnu Bhat, VP and Head of Cloud Services at Infosys (Part 1)

Vishnu Bhat is the vice president and head of cloud services at Infosys. Prior to coming to Infosys, Vishnu started his career in the instrumentation technology industry as an engineer. He taught instrumentation and computer science at the R V College of Engineering in Bangalore. In this interview, he talks about Infosys’ value proposition for enterprise clients in the field of hybrid cloud implementation and gives us insights into trends in the industry and the direction in which it is heading.

Sramana Mitra: Vishnu, let’s start with some background about yourself as well as your practice at Infosys. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Skip Smith, COO of Confluence (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: And your point is that with the cloud delivery model, the smaller fund managers are able to comply and keep up with these regulatory needs by using a service like yours to be able to do this at scale?

Skip Smith: Exactly. It levels the playing field. To your point earlier about other entrepreneurs and where investment opportunities are in this space: Our goal is to bring STP, or straight-through processing, to the investment management back office, much like it is in banking today. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Skip Smith, COO of Confluence (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So the fund managers actually make the investment decisions and all the fundamental work, but the administrative work is handled by these global service providers, and you provide these service providers with their data management needs.

SS: That is exactly right. There are large self-administrators – very large asset managers who choose to do this internally. We provide those services as well. We try to cover the entire market by servicing asset managers directly and regional third-party administrators – you can consider those as a small version of a global service provider. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Skip Smith, COO of Confluence (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Would it be fair to say that your primary expertise is in providing cloud-based solutions in the domain of regulatory compliance in the fund management space?

Skip Smith: No. I think we are really a data management solution provider. That is where our fundamental expertise is. We are merely migrating to the cloud, and our cloud offering is our next delivery message to deliver that data problem. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Skip Smith, COO of Confluence (Part 1)

Skip Smith is the chief operating officer of Confluence. Skip has more than 25 years of experience as a technology & operations executive, having studied at the University of Maryland, and he has worked for companies such as Fiserv, JPMorgan Chase and PricewaterhouseCoopers. In this interview he talks about Confluence’s value proposition in the financial services space and introduces entrepreneurs to the problems and their possible solutions in the market.

Sramana Mitra: Skip, let´s start with an introduction of Confluence and of you. >>>