James Wooster, COO at Glue42, outlines the company’s vision in creating the trading tools of the future.
What are the key changes you are making to your offering?
There are two major areas of development and both relate to our vision of workflows everywhere. The first relates to the expansion of our workflow store and the concept of Straight-Through Workflows™. We want to move away from the app-centric view of the desktop and deliver configurable business workflows that can be quickly connected to whatever applications the client already has. This is being achieved through a combination of new and enhanced Application Connectors as well as out-of-the-box support for common application services, such as context/instrument mapping.
Secondly, our clients and partners are increasingly using our zero-install web-deployed integration platform (Glue42 Core+). This was released earlier in the year and is the focus of many new features and enhancements including Application Connectors for natively installed applications and support for browser extensions. We have lots more features planned for release over the next 12-months and we expect these capabilities to be used by some of the world’s largest banks and fintech firms as they roll-out newly integrated versions of their web-based application suites.
How is the understanding of FDC3 in the industry driving appetite for your services?
FDC3 is a major subject of conversation for us, our clients and partners. For those organisations who are not willing to place their applications into someone else’s container, then FDC3 provides a cross-vendor solution and avoids lock-in. This will help drive consumption of desktop integration and focus on the needs of enhancing the user experience rather than getting bogged down in details of the data exchange.
Where do you see the greatest growth coming from over the next year?
Simple. The market now realises that you don’t need to deploy containers to achieve a seamlessly integrated desktop. Interest in Glue42 Core+ has far exceeded our expectations and is driving huge interest within financial services and other industries too. As long as an organisation has a modern web-browser then integration of their SaaS applications and internal applications is now possible without requiring an integration platform to be installed.
What role will partnerships play in your growth?
Right now, some of the world’s largest fintech vendors are embedding Glue42 into their product suites. Not only does this make their own applications appear seamlessly integrated – but they also have the ability to build their own platforms/ecosystems and also offer pre-built integration components (e.g. Application Connectors) to selected third-party systems. Finally, we owe a debt of gratitude to our system integrator partners. Over the last few quarters some of the world’s largest institutions have decided to reject the use of other integration products and rely solely upon Glue42 for their client’s digital transformation programmes. This represents a major turning point for Glue42.
What will be your greatest challenges and how will you overcome them?
Recruitment! We are constantly looking for awesome people across our centres in UK, Europe, US and Asia Pac. Our plans for our products and our company are limitless – and we fully support the use of home-workers and part-time employees.
What has winning this award meant for the firm?
For a company on a growth trajectory like ours, winning an award helps re-enforce our approach and significantly improves our brand recognition. After spending many years quietly developing product, these awards are critical in letting people know that there are new technologies and more capable platforms than perhaps they first thought.
