Everyone in IT, and for the most part, anyone who has ever worked in business, has heard the old adage "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." For the world's largest enterprises in particular, selecting the biggest, most established technology vendors was almost always the safest bet, even though it often meant sacrificing innovation and efficiency in the name of stability.

The shifting mentality of enterprise IT buyers was underscored a few weeks ago when a group of major international banks, including Barclays, HSBC, Bank of America and JP Morgan, announced the second year of the Fintech Innovation Lab, a technology incubator aimed at fostering the next generation of technologies purpose built to deliver great security, agility, and performance to the banking sector. The programme will see developers competing for six spaces in its start-up incubator in London.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that investment in smaller, more agile providers was exactly what the financial sector needed, if they wanted to combat huge software glitches and regain trust in customers. These issues hampered the reputation of banks throughout 2012’s third and fourth quarters, and continued into 2013. Now, many of the top players in the financial sector are openly acknowledging the importance of strategic technology adoption and integration in order to drive business goals and increase efficiency. Not only are they looking to next generation solutions, they are playing an active role in accelerating their development.

Of course, this newly voracious appetite for the best new IT solution is not without consequences. The rapid, diversified adoption and integration of new technologies into the IT environment is resulting in unprecedented complexity. Cloud computing, virtualisation, and mobility have given rise to hyper-dynamic environments. The rise of CMOs, CFOs, and other organisational division chiefs as stakeholders in the IT buying game also means that IT departments must integrate a wider array of technologies into their overall architecture. Many of these solutions carry the potential to deliver immense efficiency and business value. The key to unlocking that value will be adopting solutions that ensure the performance, availability, and security of these technologies.

While this new found emphasis on technology innovation and integration is an immensely positive step for financial organisations, IT managers must keep in mind that adoption of solutions aimed at driving specific business goals must be balanced with the onboarding of solutions aimed at monitoring and managing them. Here, too, these institutions should look to next generation technologies. Often, legacy management and monitoring solutions were built in the earliest days of, or even before, cloud, virtualisation, mobility, and other megatrends forced a tectonic shift in IT. While these solutions have been upgraded to varying degrees, at their core, they are often not built to scale to the incredible complexity of todays IT environments and the diaspora of applications running across the enterprise. Today, emerging solutions are purpose-built to deliver the cross-tier visibility across complex and dynamic modern IT environments. As financial institutions and businesses across all markets, add innovation (and with it, complexity) to their technology portfolios, these new solutions can help maximise return on investment, preserve the integrity and security of these high-tech assets, and ensure that they are efficiently driving business goals.