Ellie Mae Inc. bills itself as the “leading cloud-based platform provider for the mortgage finance industry,” but there is a lot more to its technology story.

The software company, which processes more than 35% of U.S. mortgage applications, has emerged as the corporate “electronic Mae” in the financial world. Unlike Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, Congressionally-chartered funders of the nation’s housing finance system, Ellie Mae is privately held.

Cloud adoption is reshaping the financial landscape in major ways, and Ellie Mae holds a prominent position in this transformation. The firm’s evolution over the past decade, through acquisitions, partnerships, choice of cloud providers and ultimately being bought out itself, offers a glimpse into what the technology future of the financial world may hold.

And that future is almost certain to be multicloud.

“As we start seeing improvements in Google and Azure and different technologies, the need for multicloud becomes that much more important,” said Justin Brodley (pictured, third from right), vice president of cloud operations at Ellie Mae. “As our acquisition strategies have matured, we’re seeing that companies which used to be on-premises that we typically acquire are now very much on a cloud. That’s really changed our multicloud story in a big way.”

Brodley spoke with John Furrier (far right), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and Steve Mullaney (far left), president and chief executive officer of Aviatrix Systems Inc., during a panel discussion at the Altitude 2020 event in Santa Clara, California. They discussed how acquisitions formed Ellie Mae’s cloud strategy, being cloud-native versus cloud “naïve,” processing data at the edge, and ongoing adoption of new technology that defines the firm’s cloud journey. (* Disclosure below.)

Impact of acquisitions

Like many other private or public companies, Ellie Mae has built its position in the industry through acquisition. The firm has acquired 10 businesses since 2008, with the most recent being Capsilon Inc. last year.

Capsilon provides cloud-based document and data management solutions for the mortgage lending business. When it was acquired by Ellie Mae, Capsilon already had an established relationship with Qumulo Inc., provider of hybrid cloud file storage.

Qumulo runs its business with a multicloud approach, leveraging partnerships with Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services Inc. And Capsilon engaged with Qumulo though its extensive relationship with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

“We started out very much focused on one cloud,” Brodley said. “As we started doing acquisitions, as we started bringing new products to market, the need for multicloud became very apparent, very quickly for us.”

Bought by Thoma Bravo

The multicloud story extends beyond firms that Ellie Mae has acquired. The mortgage application processing giant more recently found itself snapped up by a private equity firm with a strong interest in the cloud world as well.

Six months before purchasing Capsilon, Ellie Mae was acquired by Thoma Bravo for an aggregate equity value of $3.7 billion. The 40-year-old technology-focused private equity firm had previously backed over 25 cloud-based businesses, including Sailpoint Technologies Inc. and OGsys Inc.

As co-founder and managing partner, Orlando Bravo explained at the time of the acquisition, “The future is here, and the trend toward cloud is irreversible. There’s no more debate about it anymore. The cloud is the preferred model of consumption.”

Embracing cloud providers

What the financial industry’s move to cloud means in the bigger picture is that the major providers are all jockeying to build relationships with key financial institutions, such as Ellie Mae. Microsoft Corp. already claims that 80% of the world’s largest banks are Azure customers.

Even though its acquisitions have required a multicloud approach, Ellie Mae has landed on Amazon Web Services Inc. as its cloud provider of choice. In 2018, the firm announced that it would go “all in” on AWS, moving its infrastructure to the cloud provider.

It its announcement 18 months ago, Ellie Mae indicated that the move would allow it to adopt a microservices architecture to support applications, leveraging features such as AWS Lambda to run code and Elastic Container Service.

This move to major cloud providers has come with its own set of lessons as well. The financial world has taken its time to embrace cloud technologies, and institutions are learning that the legacy applications that worked one way on-premises for decades, work differently when migrated to cloud platforms.

It’s the difference between being cloud native and “cloud naïve.”

“The big naivety that people have is that they’ve been doing something that’s been successful for this long and it’s going to be successful in cloud,” Brodley said. “The reality is that’s not the case.”

Move to the edge

At the core of financial institutions’ move to cloud is data, the ability to access critical information anytime and anywhere on demand. A portion of Ellie Mae’s move to AWS included the creation of a company-wide data lake using Amazon S3.

The future for accessing data lies in the migration of computing to devices at the edge where vital information will be processed in place. Gartner has predicted that by 2023, over half of all data will be generated and processed outside the cloud or data center, an increase from only 10% in 2019. Cloud native has emerged as a transition to that reality.

“We been talking for a long time about the erosion of the edge, and this is just a continuation of that journey,” Brodley said. “As we get more cloud native and talk about APIs, the ability to lock my data in place and not be able to access it really goes away.”

Ellie Mae’s cloud strategy has also generated a significant amount of activity on the partnership front. Acquisitions and alliances with major cloud providers, such as AWS, have placed the company on the radar of other financial players interested in being a part of the platform.

Within just the last four months, Ellie Mae announced that Optimal Blue LLC would expand its collaboration on multiple API-based integrations, Snapdocs Inc. would make its digital closing technology available through Ellie Mae’s platform, and Notarize Inc. signed a deal to make its online mortgage process available as well.

The lesson to be drawn from Ellie Mae’s experience is that multicloud means an ongoing process of change and adoption. As companies are acquired and new partnerships are formed, the landscape shifts again. And, as Brodley has learned, it’s also a long journey.

“The cloud has made us much better at handling exceptions in a much better way,” said Brodley, in assessing the work that still lies ahead in full cloud adoption. “We’re about halfway there.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Altitude event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner and co-producer for Altitude 2020. Neither Aviatrix nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE