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Financial firms have great value in their data they they haven’t begun to monetize, Brendan Jung who runs the cloud partner ecosystem for Google, said at the FIA conference in Chicago yesterday.
Taking the stage with Jason Lee of Maven Wave, a Chicago consultancy, Jung admitted that Google might seem an odd choice for a futures industry conference. And while he professed some knowledge of the business from his days at IBM, Jung’s main plea was for the audience to keep an open mind and listen to what Google enterprise tools can offer them.
Google’s offers range from everyday apps like word processing and search to an App Engine that can reduce costs from millions in hardware and software to $500 a year, and Big Query which users can use to deploy thousands of cores against a problem and pay for the computing power by the minute.
“For the last 14 years Google has been building out the world’s largest, most powerful, highest quality cloud infrastructure on the planet,” said Jung. And keeping it private until recently.
Financial firms are laggards in their use of technology, Brendan said. For example, geo data, is important but financial firms haven’t begun to look at it, he said. That’s partly because the data is big and complex and analysing it on in-house systems would be prohibitively expensive.
“For the last 14 years Google has been building out the world’s largest, most powerful highest quality cloud infrastructure on the planet.”
Need some massive computing power for genome research, or to run Black-Scholes? Google’s Big Query can provide 1,000 cores, or 2,000 or, as Jung showed in a video, 600,000 cores running some genomic research. The scientific work that clicked along with results every 10 minutes on a server turned into a flow of results building up fluidly with 600,000 cores
“We have the technology to provide some scale for work that is very computationally intensive but doesn’t require a lot of input/output (I/O).”
“Big Query is when I need to find correlation among data in petabytes and billions and billions of rows, and I want to interact with it. I can write a simple SQL query and get an answer back.” Users pay by the minute, not by the hour.
Google has seen some big use cases in media and retail where users want to understand user sentiment better. For a grocery store seeking to understand stock-outs, data analysis showed no correlation with weather but a high correlation with weather forecasts -- nervous customers stocked up ahead of a storm warning. Then maintaining inventory became a simple matter of monitoring forecasts.
“”You guys are looking for alpha. It may be there in the actual financial data, and it probably is, but I think there is a big potential in this industry to look at other data sets from outside financial services.” Google can let you look cost-effectively at data sets you have never thought about before, he added.
Another service is App Engine. One enterprise customer had several applications using several million dollars worth of hardware and software. The company rewrote the software to run on Google App Engine over a period of three months and now its cost has dropped to $500 to $600 a year.
“It’s a phenomenal place to put resources you use only once in awhile.”
Google’s Platform as a Service provides an efficient setting for developers to work. It used to be that a good developer was 2-3 times as valuable as an average developer. Now a good developer is probably 100 times as valuable, while a great developer is 100 times as valuable as a good developer. So why not put them to work on the most powerful tools available?
The powerful platform available by the minute at costs that run from tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars should change the way IT-rich enterprises think about how they use computing.
“There’s no better time to take a small band of people and tackle a really important issue.”
Google operates at a different scale from Amazon Web Services or IBM’s cloud offerings, he added.
“Amazon has done a good job of democratising computing, but they don’t have to solve the problems that we have to for YouTube.” Distribution is also a core competence, he added. Google has run its own fiber around the world to deliver YouTube videos. It runs SnapChat, delivering photos for millions of users worldwide and it is the platform for SongPop which delivers 80 TB of data to 80 million users.
Security remains a concern in finance When Jung asked how many people in the FIA audience had data stored outside their four walls, only two hands went up.
“That is a mental hurdle, in my mind, for this industry,” Jung said. At Google all data is encrypted both in transit and at rest, he added.
On a more mundane level, some firms are using Google apps in daily production. BBVA Compass, the US subsidiary of the Spanish bank, uses Gmail, Google App Engine and Google Compute engine, he said.
