Financial Services Is Prominent in Dell's New NYC Solutions Center

With a goal of helping financial services companies and firms from other industries understand the potential applications of innovative industry-standard solutions to their businesses -- as well as emphasizing its own evolution into a solutions and services provider -- Dell has opened its New York Solutions Center. Located at One Penn Plaza in midtown Manhattan, the new solutions center is the 11th such facility Round Rock, Texas-based Dell has opened in the past year. The aim of these facilities is to provide a collaborative environment where Dell, its customers and partners can review and test solutions and technologies before bringing them into their own enterprises or accessing them in the cloud.

Among the offerings showcased at the New York solutions center are banking and securities applications including Dell's Trading Floor Simplification solution from Dell and Amulet Hotkey; and a High Performance Database solution form Dell and Kove. Additional capabilities featured at the solutions center include end-user computing, cloud solutions and data and analytics solutions.

The financial services industry "is under tremendous cost pressures and regulatory pressures," noted Bob Barris, Dell's VP, Global Sales, who directs the company's banking and securities business within its Global 500 group. This places significant "pressure on IT departments. They're moving [off legacy] to industry-standard technologies. This plays to Dell's strengths. We will be assisting [banks] with business analytics, risk management, high-performance databases and platforms for trading. We are the company that will take our customers from their legacy, installed base to an open environment, and [help them] move data to more efficient platforms."

Although Dell traditionally took a horizontal approach to the market that focused on company size, it has been developing a vertical industries strategy, with financial services "one of the first verticals we have," Barris reported at the solutions center opening. A key topic of consideration with financial services clients is around cloud, he added.

"Cloud means different things to everyone you talk to," Barris acknowledged. While the public cloud has benefits for many types of companies, "the biggest challenge financials have is data security and compliance," he said. "They have to track everything they do." He sees significant adoption of private clouds that allow institutions to facilitate more user self-service while also tracking usage.

[Learn more about what the growth of cloud computing means in terms of new jobs in financial services IT.]

In the past year, more than 2,400 customer engagements have been completed at Dell solution centers, the vendor reports. The other solution centers are in Limerick, Ireland; Shanghai; Austin, Texas; Herndon, Va.; Singapore; Buffalo Grove, Ill.; Tokyo; Frankfurt; Paris; Sidney; and a satellite site in Sao Paulo, Brazil. A new center in California's Silicon Valley is scheduled to open later in 2012.

Katherine Burger is Editorial Director of Bank Systems & Technology and Insurance & Technology, members of UBM TechWeb's InformationWeek Financial Services. She assumed leadership of Bank Systems & Technology in 2003 and of Insurance & Technology in 1991. In addition to ... View Full Bio