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This isn't a blog about adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs). Rather, its about a newer type of chip technology from ARM Holdings, a UK-based company, that has the potential to lower energy use and extend battery life in smaller devices. Will the technology find its way to PCs and servers? And should Intel be worried?

Almost 98% of IT executives rate their ability to respond to litigation as above average or very well prepared, according to a new survey from IDC. But according to analysts, they are vastly overrating themselves.

A new tutorial webcast added to the public site Podcasts page introduces the firm’s new Scottrade Online Community. Interestingly, we did not find any other mention of the community throughout the public or private site.

Eze Castle Integration recently hosted a roundtable discussion about the April 2008 Hedge Fund Best Practices Peport from the Asset Managers’ Committee to the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. A panel of hedge fund industry executives from Equinox Partners, Ernst & Young and the law firm Bingham McCutchen joined Eze Castle Integration in discussing the Asset Managers’ and Investors’ Committee reports. This blog is the first of two that discusses the reports and requirements for hedge funds, as well as the panel discussion and recommendations.

At Forrester's 2008 financial services forum for marketing & strategy professionals, Charles Schwab president and COO, Walt Bettinger, spoke to the audience about the key to the company's reversal of fortune since 2004: rebuilding customer loyalty.

Did you know there that there are hundreds of orthodox Jewish women in Israel with software programming degrees, strong work ethics and time on their hands? We learned about this unique workforce at the Banking on Israel IT conference held this week at the New York Stock Exchange, when we met the chief operating officer of Israeli outsourcing company Matrix.

To a journalist covering the space, there’s no obvious connection between the credit crunch and the use of blade servers in Wall Street’s data centers. But Steve Russell, managing director and global head of enterprise computing at Morgan Stanley, made the link today at a symposium hosted by blade.org. “You can reasonably assume investment banks have an increased interest in modeling mortgage derivatives and other products,” he noted. “It’s caused a huge increase in demand for compute capacity. We first started using blades in 2002 and we were talking about how many chassis we wanted. Then last year we were talking about how many racks we wanted. Now it’s, how many thousands of systems do I want delivered in a given moment?”

E-discovery is at the center of the arrest of two former Bearn Stearns managers, taken into custody today over their roles in the collapse of two hedge funds which triggered the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Internal threats, particularly where company employees from different departments collaborate over a long period of time to defraud the firm - are proving to be one of the biggest security headaches for financial firms, a conference at the New York Stock Exchange heard on Tuesday.

At a panel discussion held today at the New York Stock Exchange and hosted by the Israel Export & International Cooperation Institute, executives from Citibank, Merrill Lynch and the NYSE shared their insights on the future of virtualization, storage and other IT components critical to Wall Street firms.

Data center hardware has become a commodity and a chore to deal with, especially when servers and racks become obsolete two to four years after they’re purchased. Verari, a desktop and server blade and rack maker, has set up a new financial services group that will provide creative financing arrangements for data center equipment and refreshes.

A survey of high-level IT executives on Wall Street recently completed by Microsoft and KRC Research found that firms are facing increased demands to run real-time market risk analysis (25%), middle-office risk analytics (34%) and portfolio-related calculations such as rebalancing and hedging strategies (42%). These tasks all call for high-performance computing resources, such as hardware accelerators, fast databases and data grids. The respondents reported “a lot or some” demand for HPC to handle real-time market risk analysis (51%), middle-office risk analytics (50%) and portfolio-related calculations (54%).

As we noted in April and as Ivy Schmerken noted in her story in the SIFMA daily newspapers we put out, there’s a promising market forming around data latency monitoring tools for Wall Street firms, tools that measure and track precisely how long it’s taking market data to travel from exchange to algorithmic trading application and alert managers when latency problems occur. Such tools can help a firm make sure that its trading programs can react instantly to market changes. There were two more data latency monitoring announcements at the SIFMA show that we didn't have time to include in our earlier coverage this week.

After conducting research off and on over the last six months on green computing, Sean O'Dowd, senior research analyst, global capital markets at Financial Insights, concludes that Wall Street is not all that green. "I didn’t feel anyone was doing anything amazing," he says. "You’d hope there’d be more innovative thinking around this. You’re seeing way better efforts from other regions of the world. While much of Europe and Australia are way ahead, the U.S. is on the same playing field as China in terms of being environmentally aware."

AMD today announced its latest round of quad-core Opteron chips, the processors formerly known as Barcelona. The new chips, called SE, are the highest performing Opterons; tests have shown them to run about eight percent faster than others in the Opteron line. Servers encasing these chips should start rolling out within the month: Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell and IBM have all committed to Opteron-based servers. (Sun’s new Sparc servers are already based on Opteron chips.)

“There are so many myths about data center efficiency,” says Chris Crosby, senior vice president of sales and technical services at Digital Realty Trust, a data center facility provider that counts JPMorgan and HSBC among its customers. “A lot of energy and cooling cost savings can be obtained through the use of common sense, without the need for special equipment.”

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