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The Deutsche Börse starts its own cloud marketplace to care for standardization and more trust in the cloud

At the beginning of 2014, the Deutsche Börse will step into the area of cloud marketplaces and offer their own broker for infrastructure-as-a-service under the brand „Deutsche Börse Cloud Exchange AG“. As the basis technology, the company relies on the German cloud management provider Zimory with which they also founded a joint venture.

Independent cloud marketplace for infrastructure services

The cloud marketplace will start in early 2014 and serve as a marketplace for cloud storage and infrastructure resources. In order to realize the technical side, the Deutsche Börse has established a joint venture with the German cloud management provider Zimory. Thus, Zimory will have the responsibility to ensure that all customers can seamlessly access the cloud resources they purchase.

With the cloud market place, both companies focus on the public sector as well as research institutions, which require more infrastructure resources such as memory and computing power on demand, or even have excess capacity and would like to offer in the marketplace.

The Deutsche Börse Cloud Exchange is organized as an international and vendor-neutral cloud-marketplace and is responsible for standards such as product offerings, the admission process, changing suppliers and the warranties of the purchased resources. Customers should be able to choose their providers freely and thereby be able to decide in which jurisdiction the data is stored. For this, the specifications and standards as well as the technical provisioning is aligned in close collaboration with the participants of the marketplace. As potential partners, the Deutsche Börse Cloud Exchange named cloud providers from the traditional IT sector and national and international medium-sized enterprises and large corporations. These include inter alia CloudSigma, Devoteam, Equinix, Host Europe, Leibniz data centre, Profi AG, T-Systems and the TÜV Rheinland.

Comment: An independent and standardized marketplace provides more confidence in the cloud

A cloud marketplace as the Deutsche Börse is offering is basically nothing new. The first marketplace of its kind was launched as Spotcloud by Reuven Cohen. Even the Amazon Web Services provides the ability to trade, based on their Spot Instances, with virtual instances. However, it is a proprietary marketplace. And that is the crucial advantage for the Deutsche Börse Cloud Exchange, it is vendor independent. Which certifies a greater range of resources and on the other hand more confidence by the dependency is resolved to a single vendor. Another credit of trust the Deutsche Börse provides itself. Those is trading in its context all along with securities, energy and other raw materials as virtual goods. Why shouldn’t they do that with virtual IT resources. The Deutsche Börse is therefore the face to the outside and take care for the organizational safety and awareness, whereas Zimory is responsible for the technical execution in the background.

Another important fact, which maybe a key to success, is the topic of standardization. Since the beginning of the cloud the discussion is on „standards in the cloud“ and who will care for THE standard. With the Deutsche Börse Cloud Exchange we maybe have found a serious initiative from the industry, which will ensure that there will soon be a uniform cloud standard. This of course depends on the appropriate involvement of the cloud provider. Nevertheless, the first partner ahead CloudSigma, Equinix and T-Systems (is also using OpenStack in some of their services) show their interest in this direction. In this context it is to be seen how the open cloud community is set up for this purpose.

In the first version the Deutsche Börse Cloud Exchange will be a pure marketplace for cloud infrastructure. A next evolutionary step should be to take also external value-added services within the marketplace, with which the infrastructure resources can be used effectively to motivate developers using the resources to create new web applications and backend software for mobile apps. Furthermore, the market place should be set up as a true cloud broker.