Our Talkin’ Cloud Top 50 tour takes us to Fort Collins, Colo., where we find the headquarters of HEIT, an IT security, compliance and risk management solution provider for the U.S. financial services industry. HEIT specializes in IT services for banks and credit unions, and currently has slightly more than 200 clients mainly in California, Colorado and Texas. But the company has much bigger plans in the near future.

“We want to be a nationwide company,” said Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing Peter Matino. “That’s why I’m here.” HEIT’s ambitious goal recently received a boost from Gartner research, which predicted that 20 percent of business will have no IT assets after 2012. “That’s what we’re shooting for,” added HEIT CEO Dan Holt. “We want banks to at least have a choice. It they want to keep some of their data on-premise, that’s fine.”

And that’s how it’s going to have to be, for now. Holt described the cloud computing sector today as being “in a hybrid cloud mode” when explaining the transition process for bank and credit unions. “One hundred percent of our clients are in hybrid mode,” noted Holt. “It takes years for financial institutions to fully move to the cloud. There are limitations and complexities, especially for large banks. You can’t just rip and replace. Some of the technology is not ready for the cloud.”

There are three things HEIT clients are waiting for the company to add, Holt said: a data recovery center, the ability to run compliance programs in the cloud and more solutions related to storage. “The big thing we haven’t done yet is run the entire desktop suite in the cloud. We know clients want it.”

It’s unclear whether the technology developments or nationwide expansion will come first, but we do know there is definitely expansion potential. HEIT is only serving a fraction of the 15,000 midsized banks and credit unions in the United States. Holt and Matino both agreed the Midwest and East Coast are the next two target regions for HEIT. “We’re already operating in 33 states,” Matino said. “We just don’t have that many clients in each state.” Expect to hear more about HEIT’s nationwide expansion this summer.

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