The cloud offers the potential to deliver the same economies of scale to financial applications distribution as it does for hardware and infrastructure, according to Ashok Mittal, president and co-founder of The Beast Apps, a provider of cloud-based financial services.

The concept is what Mittal calls Application Distribution as a Service (ADaaS), by which application developers can spend less time on figuring out how to get apps distributed to mobile and desktop devices, and more time developing their ‘secret sauce’.

While developing the differentiation takes perhaps 20% of the team resources, delivering it actually takes the most bandwidth, more like 80%.

“Most tech people in the world — and I’ve talked to probably hundreds of them — would agree that a large part of the software team is focused on how do I deliver my application, as opposed to how do I build my secret sauce,” said Mittal.

The Beast Apps offers an ADaaS where a vendor can build-test-deploy commercial apps to employees and customers in the cloud within hours, days or weeks as opposed to it taking perhaps months and quarters.

According to Mittal, The Beast Apps’ ADaaS platform has attracted in a short period of time, several established financial organizations such as exchanges, inter-dealer brokers, electronic communication networks for trading, analytics vendors, and market data vendors.

Google and Apple have implemented their own versions of ADaaS through their apps stores, whereby they provide an infrastructure to deliver software to a mobile device and update it automatically. Each now has over 1.3 million apps in their app stores.

“Whether it is a billion-dollar software company or a developer working out of garage, either one can build an app and deploy it in the app store quickly and easily,” said Mittal.

The same logic applies to financial applications. “We are saying that if you know your secret sauce, you know your business process, business logic, whatever you are creating, create that and leave that distribution of your application to somebody who has an app distribution as a service,” Mittal said. “What has been done in the mobile space by Google and Apple needs to happen in the corporate space.”