Top 10 FinTech Companies to Watch

Crowd Computing Systems

Technology: A website that matches freelancers around the world to companies seeking to outsource, and artificial intelligence for assigning and evaluating the quality of the work.Why It's One to Watch: The company is harnessing a global shift toward a freelance economy, and its technology could change the way companies like banks handle outsourcing.Seeing a fundamental labor shift around what NYU professor Clay Shirky calls "cognitive surplus" (in which people use the free time they spend creating cat GIFs to do freelance work on the internet) got Crowd Computing Systems' founders, researchers at MIT, thinking. They had been studying artificial intelligence and its impact on financial fraud."We quickly pivoted that research and applied our artificial intelligence to managing this cognitive surplus, the ability to have an artificial intelligence engine not only distribute work to people around the world, but also judge the quality of the output of that work and deliver it to the enterprise," says Max Yankelevich, CEO and founder. "This was one of the biggest challenges we saw with that shift to the freelance economy. You don't have that person sitting there in your office to manage them closely. At the same time, now that you have access to many more people around the world, you have the ability to do more work on a much larger scale, parallelizing the work. You need computer aids like an artificial intelligence to do that, otherwise your management overhead would be tremendous."About 46% of Americans are full-time employees, Yankevelich estimates, the rest are freelancers. "The situation is similar around the world," he says. "By 2020, both Deloitte and Accenture are projecting much larger numbers in the freelance economy."The company has 20 million freelancers in its database. It matches workers up with work, evaluates the quality of that work and bases pay and future work assignments on the level of quality. The company's 50 employees, who work in New York and Newark, N.J., are mostly engineers.The company plans to quadruple its sales and marketing staff in the coming year.In early October, Crowd Computing was getting ready to announce a deal with a large financial information provider. Investment banks, which are already heavy users of business process outsourcing, are among the company's clients, as are online retailers and consumer goods companies.Traditional banks should come on board later, Yankelevich says. "They seem to be more conservative."For slideshow and full story, visit American Banker.

Blurred lines: Hybrid cloud deployment the future of the enterprise

By Adam HughesDoes an enterprise go with a public or a private cloud deployment? It's no longer one or the other.Nearly half of large enterprises will have deployed a hybrid cloud by the end of 2017, according to a recent Gartner Inc. study. The growth of hybrid cloud only compounds the use of cloud computing in general, which will account for the bulk of IT spending by 2017, the report noted."Hybrid is indeed the cloud architecture that will dominate," said Dave Bartoletti, analyst with Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "We're seeing over 50% of enterprises prioritizing private cloud in 2013 to 2014, and there will likely be very few private clouds that don't have a public [hybrid] component."Private clouds don't provide scaling options and cost efficiencies to the degree that public clouds do, but enterprises also want the option to keep some data behind their firewalls.A hybrid model takes the best of both worlds -- or clouds, that is.Bartoletti went even further, saying, "everyone" has plans to extend the private cloud to include public resources, which leads to a cloud that offers infrastructure both on- and off-premises, as paramount for an enterprise."The future is systems of record linked to new cloud-style systems of engagement, and that is hybrid cloud," he said.

The 'on-demand' hybrid cloud

How much easier would it be for an enterprise to connect cloud instances with dedicated servers with a simple click of a button?According to Codero Hosting, based in Austin, Texas, it's possible. Codero recently released what it dubbed as the 'on-demand hybrid cloud,' where a customer can drag and drop dedicated servers and cloud instances into its hybrid network, all within seconds, said Emil Sayegh, CEO at the company.The private network for each customer is isolated at the switch level, without a connect device, and is entirely driven by application programming interfaces."Codero's got a smart offering that mixes dedicated and elastic hosting resources, since that is the essence of hybrid," Forrester's Bartoletti said."Making it easy to consume elastic capacity outside of an existing customer's dedicated infrastructure -- with the same provider -- will definitely speed the path to cloud for companies that value their hosting provider relationships," he added.Bartoletti noted that many providers similar to Codero use some type of mix between traditional hosting and cloud services, citing CenturyLink Inc. and Verizon/Terremark as two companies with a combination of dedicated, managed and on-demand instance types.Some were not as enthused about the "on-demand" model."It's clearly not groundbreaking, and we're seeing many of these types of offerings around hybrid and multi-cloud," said David S. Linthicum, senior vice president with Cloud Technology Partners, a Boston-based cloud consulting firm.Codero's pricing starts at $15 per month for 10 Mbps, $65 for 100 Mbps, $150 for 250 Mbps, and $275 for 500 Mbps. The pricing is for each individual hybrid network that a customer adds.

The 'multi-cloud' deployment

Other cloud advocates maintain that a multi-cloud deployment with several providers is the future of cloud computing."The majority of enterprises I consult with leverage a multi-cloud model where hybrid cloud is certainly there, but [is] being replaced by something that's much more complex and valuable," Linthicum said.Many enterprises mix and match multiple clouds depending on their needs -- and that's where a cloud deployment gets complicated, he said. For instance, one enterprise could use two or more public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers, along with a private Platform as a Service (PaaS) and on-demand management and security systems from a public cloud.This week, Jelastic Inc., based in San Mateo, Calif., unveiled another option for enterprises -- an integrated PaaS for private, public and hybrid clouds. According to Jelastic, it is the first time PaaS and IaaS have been integrated into a single platform."These days, the number of projects involving just one or two cloud computing providers or technologies is few and far between," Linthicum noted. "It's more likely there are a half dozen involved."The key, Linthicum said, is that a cloud provider needs to be able to work with other vendors to make an effective hybrid cloud -- regardless of whether it offers a distribution on a private or a public cloud.And that makes OpenStack valuable, as it allows IT to use the same cloud platform on-premises and with a service provider, analysts added."That will help extend skills to more cloud deployment types and allow cloud service providers to offer services around OpenStack to help clients migrate and evolve toward a consistent, hybrid architecture," Bartoletti said.Meanwhile, finding the resources to manage complex hybrid cloud deployments remains a challenge."Since you're managing a platform across private and public clouds, the ability to make these resources work and play well together is certainly a problem," Linthicum said.Linthicum cited cloud management platform vendors that provide a management, governance and automation layer, including RightScale Inc., ServiceMesh, Hewlett-Packard, VMware Inc. and IBM.

Codero Launches Hybrid Cloud Hosting

By Chris BurtCodero announced on Wednesday the release of an On-Demand Hybrid Cloud Hosting offeringCloud provider Codero has announced on Wednesday the release of an On-Demand Hybrid Cloud Hosting offering.Codero says this will provide customers with the advantages of traditional IT infrastructure as well as the strength and flexibility of a public cloud.“While public cloud hosting was the hype a few years ago, it is now clear that a more adaptable computing model is needed in order for businesses to run their applications in the best ways possible,” Emil Sayegh, CEO and president of Codero Hosting said. “Our On-Demand Hybrid Cloud Hosting was developed based on the reality of how businesses deploy and run applications today. It gives customers the power to use the IT resources best suited for their individual needs, getting the best of all worlds through one trusted partner with unparalleled hosting expertise – a true on-demand IT infrastructure model.”According to Codero, its hybrid offering avoids the reliance of its competitors on proprietary or outside sources for components. This makes the Codero hybrid cloud less expensive, the company says, with dedicated native and cloud instances in one private network.Codero boasts “an easy click-and-drop approach” and automated provisioning and instancing “in just minutes.”The On-Demand Hybrid Cloud Hosting features include on-demand scalability for usage spikes, no I/O resource contentions for databases, customizable network performance, guaranteed 100 percent network uptime, and easy connection to dedicated servers, Smart Servers, and cloud servers.The service promises the “ultimate combination of IT architectures and performance,” and that customers will pay only for necessary connection speeds.Hybrid hosting has become a hot topic, as CloudSigma CEO Robert Jenkins discussed with the WHIR last month, and as suggested in a study Microsoft and 451 Research earlier this year. Hybrid offerings generally involve partnerships, such as VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, which was announced in late August along with a partnership with Savvis.