Is Fidelity's move to put RIAs deeper into the cloud gonna make it rain?

Kelly,

I think it a good play for Fidelity to leverage an outside entity to provide something that has been well commoditized. There really isn’t anything earthshattering outside Fidelity’s choice to buy versus build.

In 2009 I was in a search for a Cloud provider that actually wanted to understand the needs of this industry. At the recommendation of Desktone I was pointed to ICC Global Hosting in summer of 2009. Since that time ICC Global Hosting (www.iccgh.com) has been supplying virtual desktops, virtual offices, back up and recovery and instant-on office scalability.

I know the ExternalIT folks and they are a very competent team. But this is not a disruptive event rather it is basic component of Cloud computing.

For me the excitement is that after bringing this technology to advisors four years ago they are now willing to adopt this technology and being a part of that is gratifying.

A prediction came from RIMM’s CEO Thorsten Heins today that tablets will be dead in five years and that cell phones will be everyone’s portable computing platform that will plug into docks that will provide other user input and display capabilities.

This has started with many companies tossing their desktops and providing laptops and access to virtual offices via Cloud offerings from the likes of ICC and others.

Pete

I am having trouble seeing the innovation here. And it’s not very cost effective. It’s a commodity service that will undoubtedly be offered on lower cost platforms like Amazon Web Servies. Aside of the 'discount’, where is Fidelity’s value add?