Emerging IT Technologies (EIT)

Group Asignment-1

Fintech : Choosing a Cloud Services Provider

Submitted by:
Group 10
Aakash Gala (MBA07001)
Abhilash Dhole (MBA07004)
Gaurav Jain (MBA07018)
Kunal Ghotekar (MBA07025)
Pritam Jaiswal (MBA07037)
Sahil Bodhale (MBA07046)
Q.1) What business is Fintech in? What are the sources of revenue for Fintech?
Ans:- Fintech is a Tampa-based privately owned company which processed electronic payments and reports
relevant data for U.S. alcoholic beverages wholesalers and retailers. It was founded in 1991 with the launch
of EFTPS. Up to 2016 it has 80 employees and supported payments of more than $24 billion per year.
It is working with over 2800 distributors and processing invoices for around 440000 relationships nationwide.
Fintech is an instrumental asset to the modernization of the alcohol world.
The major source of revenue for Fintech is through cloud computing by providing data insights to these
beverage businesses to strengthen the relationship with their customers.

Q.2) “Data integration was an important challenge that Fintech had to address early on.” (Page 2)
Explain what is data integration and how it is a problem for Fintech.
Ans:- Data is stored and defined variously by different producers, wholesalers and retailers. A same beverage
can have different names and labels in different systems of these wholesalers and retailers and to integrate and
map this data is the key challenge. For eg. a producers of “Kwo’s Beer” might label it under “KBeer” in its
database within a “BRAND” attribute but a wholesaler database might store is as “Kwos Beer” within “B-
BRAND” attribute.
To resolve such issue, Fintech used a “cleansing” process to match data transacted across the three tiers for
making data more useful for reporting and analysis purpose.

Q.3) Study the structure and working of Fintech’s IT department. Comment on the suitability of the
structure in building the IT infrastructure of a company like Fintech.
Ans:- Fintech comprises of employees with varied technical background and skill sets. It has fully functional
IT infrastructure. Specific capabilities at Fintech involves Network administration, security, database
management, custom application programming , hardware support, project management, analytical report
development and software support.
They used proprietary as well as locally customized software such as Excel, SQL server , opensource Eclipse
IDE for Java, etc.
For some projects they hire outside consultants having specific expertise pertaining to that type of project and
they are being considered as “long-time partners”.

Q.4) What are the managerial decisions involved in choosing a cloud solution? Based on the Gartner
Hype Cycle in Exhibit 4, which mode of cloud delivery would you have chosen - PaaS or IaaS? Give
reasons.
Ans:- The management has to frequently take decisions on cloud service providers. They have to guide
provider evaluation on three points: Extract, Load Stage Process, and Release. They have to estimate the cost
of each service providers and has to see economic, technical, human and other factors such as security.
They have to evaluate the provider on the basis of Training, System support, customer support, data and system
availability, Security and Programmability. They tell the employees to gather data of the providers about their
offerings from the provider’s websites and to have a SWOT of their technical aspects.
As per Gartner Hype cycle it is clear that PaaS is on its way down the Trough of Disillusionment, means the
interest is wanning as experiments and implementations are falling to deliver while in the case of IaaS it is at
the Slope of Enlightenment, means it can benefit the enterprise and can be more widely understood so we will
be choosing IaaS over PaaS.
Q.5) From Exhibit 6, pick any three items in which all the service providers give exactly same features
and explain why you think all of them provide these features.
Ans:-
1) Pay-as-you-go :- All the providers are giving this service so that the clients have to pay for only the
services they procured rather than provisioning for a certain amount of resources that may or may
not be used. In simple terms it is an Usage based pricing.
2) Training and certifications :- As for using this cloud services a lot of training is needed by the firms
and if the provider provides with necessary training and guidance for using that service the clients
are more attracted towards that service as they don’t have to allocate more resources for that
purpose and if the company is certified by this big Cloud Computing services than it builds trust in
the consumers as well.
3) Scalability : This service is one of the important feature as it measures system’s ability to increase or
decrease in performance and cost in response to system processes and demands. This feature gives
the client a flexibility of using the cloud service. And also it functions well even when systems
changes. It helps to keep up with ever-evolving demands for network infrastructure.