State Street Takes A Bigger Chunk of the Cloud

Already an early adopter of the cloud to manage tech overhead, State Street has taken a stake in CloudTP, and a seat on the board

Bank Technology News | June, 2011

State Street has aggressively turned to cloud computing to cut costs
over the past couple of years, a strategy that this week included the
institution making an investment in Cloud Technology Partners (CloudTP)
and adding bank CIO Chris Perretta to the cloud computing startup's
board of directors.

Perretta will join John Littlechild, a managing director for HealthCare
Ventures, and CloudTP's four founding executives on the board. CloudTP
did not disclose the size of State Street's stake, nor would it discuss
how State Street may use CloudTP's technology as part of the bank's own
cloud deployment strategy. In a statement, Perretta said he was
"delighted" to join the board and participate in the growth of the
company as "cloud computing continues to change the way businesses
approach information technology."

CloudTP provides consulting and application services for public, private
and hybrid clouds. It recently received a $1 million round of funding,
and says it will use State Street's additional stake for working
capital, intellectual property creation and to support its expansion.

State Street has been active in embracing the cloud and new IT project
management techniques such as Lean software development methodologies as
part of a goal to cut as much as $625 million from operating costs
between 2010 and 2014.

The bank has said part of these cuts will come from sustained
investments in its technology platform, including the development of
lower-cost operating models such as private processing clouds. Earlier
this month, for example, the bank implemented a private cloud
environment to make data and analysis available to institutional clients
in real time.