RELATED ARTICLE: "Cloud Computing Has Become a Dominant Force in Financial Services

The cloud has been praised for its cost-effectiveness and scalability. But just as important is cloud-based solutions' ability to improve the user experience. Execution management system provider Portware, for example, has bundled value-added services into its cloud offering: all customers get access to a FIX gateway in the cloud for connectivity to broker algorithms, exchanges and alternative trading systems (ATSs); plus, they get access to real-time market data and securities classification codes from Thomson Reuters via the Elektron infrastructure, which hosts the Portware application.

"All of this is available out of the box," says Portware president and chief technology officer Ary Khatchikian, who insists that the customer doesn't need anyone managing the hardware or the data. "All that is available for a log-in. All the heavy lifting is gone."

For financial services vendors, the ability to offer integrated services to clients with a new, variable pricing model is a tremendous benefit, suggests Dan Retzer, CTO of XSP, which offers cloud-based corporate actions applications. By 2013, according to Retzer, service providers such as XSP commonly will offer integrated solutions in which the client pays not only for the applications but also for the underlying data.Instead of paying XSP, for example, for the application and then paying multiple data vendors, "You'd pay a single price for the consumption of infrastructure data and the application," Retzer says.