NYSE Technology, the tech arm for NYSE Euronext, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, has partnered with EMC and VMware to create a cloud computing platform designed specifically with the low-latency needs of the financial services market.

This financial service cloud, called the Capital Markets Community Platform, marks a first for an industry that is reliant on top-of-line services that ensure fast and secure communication as well as high-end compute and storage resources. The new service will allow for outsourcing of core operations to remote datacenters operated by NYSE Technologies, although full server, interconnect and other details about the infrastructure side have not been revealed.

It should be noted that this platform, unlike other cloud services offered by the likes of Amazon or Google, will not touch the borders of the public internet. As the name of the platform suggests, this is a “community cloud” thus it is designed to operate withinin the confines of a defined, protected set of users within a set of parameters for partitioning and sharing.

Back in 2009, NIST listed definitions for the four primary cloud deployment models. You can probably guess the first three (public, private, and hybrid) but in that mix exists the notion of the “community cloud.” According to their formal definition (which is open to updates from the public ) in this type of deployment, “The cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy and compliance considerations).”

The implementation details around community clouds for large enterprises have been dodgy, in part because in the business context, sharing resources, virtual or otherwise, with others in your industry is just…well, icky. It requires a complete rethinking about how you “own” your data and adds some heartburn due to security worries to boot.

For these reason, community clouds have gained the most traction in research and academia where the spirit of open collaboration tends flow quite a bit more freely than in the corporate world.

Community clouds are a friendly-sounding concept for real communities, but what about competitive communities who are only considered a “community” because all parties are trying to make a killing in the same sort of way? This concept looks good from the outside when those communities (like financial services) that are barred from public cloud resources due to stringent security and compliance concerns, but only time will tell how widely adopted the concept will become in this industry. It appears that a lot will depend on the lessons learned from NYSE’s effort—and even more will depend on a sea change in the way financial services consider ownership of their data and code.

According to Stanley Young, CEO of NYSE Technologies, the future of electronic trading rests in the cloud—his cloud. He sees the merging together of multiple users under a compliance and security-aware resource that caters to the very specific needs of his crowd as invaluable. Still, for a short while anyway, this might be a bit of a tough sell. Reports have indicated that so far there are only two financial firms of users giving it a go publicly, but Young says others are quietly trying on the service. He expects this to revolutionize market activity in coming years with the high hopes that all 1,200 of his clients will be stepping onto the platform eventually.

Pico Quantitative Trading and Millennium Management  are the only firms that have openly been experimenting with the cloud which comes out of beta on July 1. Pico’s CEO Jarrod Yuster was quoted today saying that “the platform can provide instant access to all the historical data the NYSE has. While a firm could always download that information to its own servers, having access to a cloud speeds up the process and reduces time to market.”

The platform will provide the core services that have been the bread and butter for NYSE Technologies. These include their Superfeed, Risk Management Gateway, Managed Services Hub and Liquidity Center Network services along with a host of new offerings to enhance real-time trading,

Young told the Financial Times “order management systems, execution management systems, backtesting—so much of the flow can be contained within the physical walls of our datacenter, reducing the time to trade.” He notes, however that the cloud is not hosting “set-the-world-alight applications but they lend themselves well to virtualization and take massive costs out of the industry.”

This cloud service will allow trading data that can be spun off to test algorithms with the vast wells of market data, which means that users will be able to shave a great deal of time off the process of downloading the data to their own datacenter. Furthermore, as Young points out, this will be able to host proprietary trading code with the option to let firms store that valuable code on isolated servers. This option to isolate the most sensitive of proprietary information might be enough to change hearts and minds at first, but if Young has his way, everyone will gather under the shade of the community cloud—even if it means some of their core components are out of sight.

According to the Financial Times, the timing of this cloud launch couldn’t be better. “Trading firms and banks are seeking to outsource more business as they are increasingly pressured by the cost of maintaining cutting-edge technology and connectivity to new platforms amid signs of dwindling margins among high-frequency trading firms.”

While this is the first financial services cloud that falls under the NYSE umbrella, the idea of managed services (which these days can be mingled freely with general “cloud” in this market) is nothing new. For instance, Equinix already has a co-location service by which users can share their data, software and send or receive orders from markets in the network. In many senses, if there were no fears about hopping on board with this type of computing setup, the NYSE effort should look like calm waters too.

On a final note, the technology partnerships behind this cloud case could mean big things for VMware and EMC. The VMware piece of the puzzle is not difficult to fit in; the company provided its virtualization resources to match the storage and security offerings from EMC with both very likely bending over backward to deploy a no-cost-spared focus on performance and protection.  If the effort is successful there couldn’t be a better case study for both companies “Even the New York Stock Exchange trusts the cloud!” or if it quietly slips out of headlines and doesn’t take off, it could mean another long waiting period between more news of big financial clouds.