What are the current trends we’re seeing at our clients that relate to our cloud strategy?

We can note three significant trends that relate to our cloud strategy. As trading firms, asset managers and other clients move their applications and workflows to the cloud, they get value from vendors who can effectively deliver data there. In addition, clients realize that they have a lot of point-to-point data connections within their companies and with their suppliers and customers. They see how having such datasets locked within specific silos makes licensing such data for additional use cases less efficient. They're looking for a solution to that problem. Finally, the time and cost of integrating third-party data into client's workflows and applications remains a substantial speed bump to unlocking the value of that data.

What is ICE doing in the cloud?

To begin with, we store large datasets in the cloud, in cloud-friendly formats, allowing clients to easily access this data using tools like Databricks and Snowflake. We continue to think of new ways in which we can leverage the cloud to bring greater value to clients. One such use case is hosted delivery. Clients have been leveraging traditional delivery channels, APIs and SFTP, to interact with us for some time. As I mentioned earlier, loading and hosting data is a major hassle for our clients. Cloud technology allows us to host data once and turn it on quickly for customers who can in turn put it to use immediately.

The other opportunity relates to leveraging the Cloud’s computing power. We have clients with enormous compute requirements over very finite periods of time. A good example is our ICE data analytics offering, which can generate cash flows and analytics on complex instruments that might be required in a timely way but only once a month. We can leverage on-demand computing to provision service of intense loads like this quickly and efficiently.

How can accessing ICE’s data in the cloud benefit clients?

We're seeing clients centralize their data in the cloud, exploiting the inherent scale there to create a single place from which their various businesses can easily access it, and also discover new data they can leverage. Also, we're seeing clients leverage our hosted data in solutions like Databricks and Snowflake to immediately interact with it and frequently bring our data together with their own content. As their data needs grow, the incremental effort to turn on new data sets is really close to zero. It's a game changer.