The financial services industry presents tremendous opportunity to HPC vendors who are equipped with the right knowledge, according to a recent report by Intersect360 Research, a leading market intelligence, research, and consulting advisory practice for the high performance computing industry. The full 13-page report, "High Performance Business Computing in Financial Institutions," highlights a number of factors that vendors selling into this market need to know in order to be successful.

"Financial institutions comprise the second-largest commercial High Performance Computing (HPC) vertical market, and one of today's fastest-growing opportunities," explains Christopher Willard, Ph.D., Intersect360 Research's chief research officer. "It is second only to manufacturing in current spend."

Financial services users do buy HPC technologies, but "they do not necessarily think of themselves as HPC users," says Intersect360 Senior Analyst Sue Gouws Korn, CFA, herself a 20-year veteran of the financial services industry. "These buyers," Korn explains, "have a different vocabulary than High Performance Technical Computing users, and respond to different drivers."

Application Areas and Recommendations

The report defines several broad application areas as part of the financial services vertical: trading; risk management; pricing and valuation of securities and derivatives; and business and economic analytics. Vendors who wish to sell into this market should be mindful of its taxonomy when addressing the market, Korn recommends, and should also acquire industry-level expertise in financial services, consider solutions that pair service and systems components, and begin by selling into the quantitative finance group.

As vendors customize their approach to this market, Korn goes on to explain, "They should recognize the opportunity presented by today's increased pressure on the financial services industry to increase the accuracy, reliability and frequency of financial analytics."

HPTC and HPBC

Intersect360 Research separates the HPC market into High Performance Technical Computing (HPTC or Technical HPC) and High Performance Business Computing (HPBC or Business HPC) segments:

• High Performance Technical Computing is the application of HPC tools and technology used by scientists and engineers in research, development, and production across industry, government, and academia.
• High Performance Business Computing is the application of HPC tools and technology to business problems in order to make a business decision, optimize business performance, or field computationally-based products. Applications fall into one of several categories:
  • Complex event processing
  • Business optimization
  • Virtual environments
  • Ultra-scale computing

These application types span many specific applications in diverse vertical markets. They are primarily used in the commercial sector, but some are also found in the government sector. Financial services is the largest vertical in the Business HPC segment.