Just read the article in MIS “CBA issues warning to IT suppliers” where Michael Harte their CIO says that CBA was now actively looking for business-grade pay-as-you-go software and infrastructure, including so-called cloud computing and software-as-a-service.

I totally agree with his direction.

Many things for a financial institution need to be done 100% in-house, no question. But to be able to leverage a growing sea of enterprise-grade cloud components and weave them into your offering  dramatically increased leverage for the business.

Why not let the business make use of cloud tools? When all you have to do is plug a third party component into your client web-site, the time to market for these implementations is light-years faster than their current in-house delivery models.

The trick now is to get their internal architecture into a position where they can actually use those components quickly and effectively.

Get the technology due diligence process tuned so that new components can be quickly evaluated and have a framework that lets these tools plug in.

Many insitutions still can’t get single sign-op going across their own apps, how will they be able to share these new enterprise components?

However, it is all moving in the right direction though as far as this enterprise software-as-a-service is concerned <grin>

Our last deployment of our cloud based calculator components took less than 30 days. We won’t mention how long the due diligence and legal took though!