First the group was asked what Wall Street’s greatest IT needs will be over the next five years. Richard Rabinovich, managing director at Citibank, said, “From the front-office perspective, trading volumes are growing wildly and we need good technology to overcome these challenges. Also there’s a huge need for creative technology that will allow us to risk-manage portfolios in near real-time.”

Steve Rubinow, CIO of NYSE Euronext, agreed that rising trade volumes will continue to be the biggest challenge. “Volumes are crazy and low latency is extremely important as things get faster,” he said. But, he added, “underlying everything we’re doing is cost. There’s pressure to do things cheaper and cheaper.”

Jeffrey M. Birnbaum, chief technology architect and global head of architecture and engineering at Merrill Lynch, expressed a strong interest in utility computing. “What we really want to do is have a much larger technology footprint, and yet operate at a lower cost,” he said. Being able to pay for technology on a per-capita or per-hour basis would be helpful, he said. “Any technologies that take us into the utility computing space, so that I can treat my entire compute platform as one big grid” would be welcome.

Cloud computing is part of Birnbaum’s virtualization vision. “It’s interesting that we manage desktops today as if it were the early 80s,” he said. “We install software on desktops; that’s a broken model. If you take elements of what a cloud computing environment gives you, how bits get to be on the computer -- whether they’re served off a disk or off a network -- begins to change the game.” Merrill Lynch is in the midst of a major desktop virtualization project.

Birnbaum also seeks technology that would take advantage of parallel computing opportunities. The escalating number of processors per CPU calls for not only the ongoing education of programmers but also “any technologies that make it easier to bring to bear parallel computing from a navigational perspective are desirable,” he said.

Asked what their biggest storage challenges are, the panelists mentioned rising costs and a desire for more commoditization. “The last time I looked at my budget, storage was the single largest item of capital expenditure,” said Rubinow. “Like it or not, every bit, whether it be a transaction or an email or whatever it is, has to be stored somewhere for risk and regulatory reasons. But a lot of the big storage manufacturers are trying to come up with more commodity approaches to storage, so from a high-level perspective, things are starting to look better.”

Rabinovich said there’s a need to justify storage costs to end users. “It’s the Best Buy benchmark,” he said. “Non-tech customers will ask why the storage they’re paying for costs more than local vendors like Best Buy. It’s important to be able to explain the pricing to a non-technical audience.”

Beyond lower costs, storage needs to be commoditized, Birnbaum suggested. “The confusion of storage today is essentially that there are two or three different types of interconnect technologies,” he said. “In this day and age, I don’t think there’s any need for Fibre Channel, NAS and SAN. It would be nice if all that could converge down to a single fabric.”