The New York Stock Exchange today announced the launch of a new cloud platform that lets traders lease computing power from NYSE’s new northern New Jersey locale. The platform, the first of its kind in the financial sector, was developed in a team-up with EMC and VMware.

The Capital Markets Community Platform is designed to provide customers access to NYSE Technologies’ offerings line-up from the cloud.

“We began working with VMware and EMC with a goal of creating not only the first cloud-based platform in the financial services industry, but a completely new model in customer service and business empowerment,” said Stanley Young, CEO, NYSE Technologies.

Users can leverage Capital Markets Community Platform to “enable the reapid provisioning of computing power and market data.” They can access NYSE services including SuperFeed, the Risk Management Gateway (RMG) and Managed Services Hub, and the global Liquidity Center Network on an on-demand basis.

The platform is currently in beta stage, and is used by only a handful of customers, including Quantitative Trading and Millennium Management LLC, as well as others. It is expected to go live on July 1.

Another company which had news from the financial sector today is Dell. In a team-up with CIT Group, the companies launched partnership financing programs in Brazil and Mexico for enterprise customers interested in buying Dell products.

Cloud companies are shifting their focus to the financial sector, and vice versa. According to a study by Cisco, introducing new technologies such as cloud-based services, HD video conferencing and so on may help banks tap the multi-billions worth under-50 investors demographic. GigaSpaces in turn is one of the service provides making steps to monetize this, perhaps most notably with its partnership with Excelian.

GigaSpaces, as well as EMC and VMware, are capitlising on the huge customer base the fincial sector holds. They’re expanding to other directions as well, including MapR’s Hadoop distribution.