The pace of transformation in digital business continues to drive innovation throughout the market, but many businesses still lack the tools necessary for keeping up and remaining secure. To enable the hefty production, high-compliance needs of financial institutions, Alex Sayle (pictured, right), platform engineering at Beacon Platform Inc., is working on providing an accessible financial analytics management platform with the support of Brandon Jung (pictured, left), vice president of alliances at GitLab B.V.

Jung and Sayle spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed digital needs in the financial industry and how Beacon and GitLab work collaboratively to deepen their mutual hybrid solution offerings. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Knight: Tell our viewers about Beacon Platform.

Sayle: Beacon Platform is a company that came out of the financial services from the large banks. In those places internally, they have to have this open-source-like culture where there are people contributing in the same codebase. There’s a life cycle of how things are done, and it’s rapid moving. We’ve taken those experiences that people have done for years to build these communities, best practices, and prescriptions and turned it into a product of financial tooling, infrastructure, and toolboxes to make financial applications.

We’ve brought it to the smaller bunch: insurance companies, large banks. They can take our platform, bring their own analytics, and then build financial applications that they want on top of it and be ensured that they’re compliant with security. We’ve done the governance [and] security for you. All you have to do is put your good ideas to use and make applications.

Knight: Give us some examples of the business problems this platform solves.

Sayle: Typically in the financial space, the people that have the great ideas are not developers, [user experience] people, [user interface] designers, [or] security people. Yet they are are the people driving the core business and the value. How do we make them productive, make sure their lives are easier? You give them a lifecycle for software that they can start saying, “I’ve got an idea. I’ll hack it up.” And when it’s hacked, they can publish it. It comes out the other end, and all the reporting is underneath there, security is there, compliance is there, authentication is there.

That idea is now being actualized in the matter of days, weeks rather than months and years. Our customers can take ideas they’ve been working on and turn [them] into reality in a very short amount of time, and then be comfortable that whole platform itself remains secure, compliant.

We take the customers on their cloud journey, whereas our customers are taking us on their needs. “I can help you in the cloud space, you can help us in the financial ideas space, and together we can actually make applications.” Whatever we build ourselves, we can resell it to others whilst the customers’ intellectual property can stay with them. It’s a really interesting collaboration.

Walls: What about the relationship between [Beacon and Gitlab]?

Jung: Beacon is very financial-services focused; we’re a [development operations] tool for anyone. Beacon is taking what GitLab’s done about building that whole tool chain; there’s really a tool chain crisis out there. A developer, they want to live in their [integrated development environment], do their development, and publish. But you start looking at what needs to be set up after that, you’re talking 15 other steps to go through. That was our “aha”; there’s an opportunity to treat that as one full application as a DevOps tool set across the entire board.

That’s where we match up. They wrap all the important financial data, all the other things that matter to a bank, but at the core of it they also leveraged GitLab both as a tool to develop their own product and also to offer to their own customers. The majority of our customers love the fact that they can run anywhere. While Beacon does run on Amazon, their customer bases have to run on-prem. We’re seeing that hybrid become more common. We work really well together on that side, and they push us hard.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: GitLab B.V. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither GitLab nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE