Wall Street & Technology: Blog

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When financial crisis escalated, firms failed to communicate with worried investors
September 30, 2008 @ 05:41 PM | By Melanie Rodier

When the financial crisis escalated with the fall of Lehman Brothers, the AIG bailout and the sale of Merrill Lynch two weeks ago, firms failed to communicate sufficiently well online with their client base, according to a report.

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Why the Bailout Failed and Ideas for Fixing Wall Street and its IT
September 29, 2008 @ 05:00 PM | By Penny Crosman

Congress’s failure to pass the Treasury’s proposed $700 billion financial bailout package today came as no surprise to Anil Kumar, global head – financial services group at IT services giant Satyam. “They didn’t do a good job of summarizing the plan,” Kumar says. “They’ve got to redefine the plan to be more consumer-oriented, rather than solely based on removing toxic assets from banks’ balance sheets.” He adds, “Unless the housing problems are addressed, I don’t think it will pass.”

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TGIF: The Situation on the Economy
September 26, 2008 @ 08:42 AM | By Penny Crosman

In the Situation Room, Wolfe Blitzer speaks with experts on the economy, and John McCain.

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Tools To Help Older Clients Weather the Economic Storm
September 25, 2008 @ 04:02 PM | By Penny Crosman

At least two older people I know live entirely off the income they get from ultra-conservative investments such as Treasury bills. With long-term Treasury notes paying 2-4%, they’re watching their monthly incomes plummet. To pay their bills, they have to periodically sell off some of their principal, a scary thing they hesitate to do, knowing they’ll have even less to live off of.

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So Where Did Risk Management Go Wrong?
September 23, 2008 @ 10:24 AM | By Greg MacSweeney

Who dropped the ball? Risk managers? Traders? Executives? Regulators? Unfortunately, the answer isn't simple.

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Three Ways to Look at Cloud Computing
September 23, 2008 @ 09:57 AM | By Penny Crosman

For anyone who has wondered what cloud computing is, William Fellows, an analyst at the 451 Group, offered three definitions at yesterday’s High Performance on Wall Street Show:

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The End Of An Era
September 22, 2008 @ 08:04 AM | By Penny Crosman

The news today that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are going to be converted to highly regulated commercial banks with strict capital ratio requirements marks the end of Wall Street's ultra profitable hayday. It will be welcomed by the American people, who are done bailing out once highrolling firms with tax dollars. "You flew too close to the sun, now your wings are melting, too bad for you," was a friend's reaction to this morning's news.

Could there be unintended consequences, for the markets and for the industry, of so quickly and dramatically reconfiguring this once powerful industry?

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At the End of A Stressful Week, A Bit of Blackberry Humor
September 18, 2008 @ 06:02 PM | By Penny Crosman

Even in difficult times – in fact, especially in difficult times – it’s helpful to stop and laugh at something silly. Today, we bring you the latest gem from the clever gang at www.blackbookberry.com:

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Job Opportunities Amidst the Crisis
September 18, 2008 @ 10:18 AM | By Penny Crosman

For those of you looking for jobs right now, we'd like to share with you articles we've come across about companies that want to pick up Wall Street's best and brightest dislocated IT talent.

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A Truly Global Crisis: "Bankz are Idiotz"
September 18, 2008 @ 08:09 AM | By Greg MacSweeney

You know the credit crisis is really big when a Bulgarian truck driver says in a Viennese bar in broken English "bankz are idiotz!"

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The Heart of Wall Street is Still Beatin’
September 17, 2008 @ 07:47 PM | By Julio Gomez

I have a friend that I was ready to feel sorry for. He’s a Sales Trader at a bulge bracket firm which, in certain times, invites envy. These days, it elicits concern.
“Hey, are you alright…?”
“Wow…interesting times, huh? Are you alright…?”
“Lehman was riding high just a couple of years ago! Mother Merrill? Geez…are you alright?”

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Wall Street IT Spending to Drop 5-15% in Wake of Lehman Meltdown, Merrill Merger
September 17, 2008 @ 12:10 PM | By Penny Crosman

Although my head is still spinning due to the crisis of the last few days, Matt Bienfang, senior research director of TowerGroup, has already estimated the impact that Lehman’s bankruptcy and Merrill’s pending acquisition by Bank of America will have on overall IT spending by Wall Street. “Between Bear, Lehman and Merrill you’re talking about 4-5% of the entire industry spend on technology,” he notes, adding that Lehman’s brokerage and wealth management business is bound to be bought and absorbed by somebody [Barclay’s announced Wednesday morning it would buy Lehman's North American investment banking, capital markets operations and supporting infrastructure]. “So Lehman’s technology spend won’t entirely disappear, but it will be reduced.” IT spending for Merrill’s organization should continue, he believes, but the fact that BofA expects to reap $7 billion in savings from the deal means some cutbacks are to be expected.

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Reigning in Out-of-Control IP Addresses
September 17, 2008 @ 09:19 AM | By Penny Crosman

The rise of virtualization and voice over IP means that companies such as Wall Street firms are adding thousands of IP addresses (numbers designating each individual machine on a network or on the Internet) to their rosters. Managing these IP addresses is becoming a major IT challenge, according to Michael Hyatt, CEO and founder of BlueCat Networks. “These are the unintended consequences of IP growth,” he said at his booth at Interop this morning. (He was surrounded by young women in golf outfits with "Who's Your Caddy?" imprinted on the backs of their skirts.)

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Omgeo’s Lind Talks About Allustra Deal, Lehman (VIDEO)
September 16, 2008 @ 11:58 AM | By Melanie Rodier
At the SIBOS payments conference in Vienna, Greg MacSweeney talks to Omgeo MD Tim Lind about the company’s acquisition of Allustra, as well as the latest events on Wall Street…

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Intel Says New Server Chips Are Virtualization- and Environment-Friendly
September 15, 2008 @ 05:03 PM | By Penny Crosman

In keeping with the ongoing Wall Street data center trends toward server consolidation, virtualization and reduction of energy costs, Intel says its latest round of server chips perform 50% better and use 10% less power than the previous generation of Caneland 7300 chips.

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A Payments Conference where No One is Talking About Payments
September 15, 2008 @ 06:30 AM | By Greg MacSweeney

A bankruptcy filing trumps payments technology news, even at a payments conference.

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Optimizer for Online Trading and Other Virtualized Web Apps
September 12, 2008 @ 05:38 PM | By Penny Crosman

If a spike in trading occurs on your site one day, will your online trading application be able to keep up? This is the type of issue behind RadWare’s announcement of VirtualDirector today, a product that aims to improve the performance of virtualized web applications.

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Sybase’s Multimedia Messaging Service Goes Live
September 12, 2008 @ 02:49 PM | By Penny Crosman

The global multimedia messaging service Sybase told us about in July is now ready for purchase.

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TGIF: Messaging Via the BlackBookBerry
September 11, 2008 @ 05:29 PM | By Penny Crosman

The latest form of interoffice communication, brought to you by the folks at BlackBookBerry, "Where low tech meets high expectations."

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Hard Drives That Can Keep Up With Quants
September 10, 2008 @ 05:53 PM | By Penny Crosman

The heads-down financial wizardry that quants perform – constructing and running pricing models, volatility models, market simulations and such – as well as the reams of data traders look at and the analysis portfolio managers perform, all call for supercomputer-like desktop machines. The round of high-performance solid state drives that Intel announced today looks like a good fit for such Wall Street power users. The drives hold a lot of data (80 gigabytes), are high performing (with read speeds of up to 250MB per second and write speeds up to 70MB per second) and have low latency (85 millionths of a second read latency). They have no moving parts, which should make them less likely to break than mechanical drives (these SSDs boast a mean time between failure of 1.2 million hours) and they consume a mere 150 milliwatts of electricity each (a milliwatt is a thousandth of a watt; a household light bulb consumes 25 to 100 watts).

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OpTier Offers A Clearer View of Transactions
September 09, 2008 @ 02:18 PM | By Penny Crosman

OpTier is shipping a new version of its CoreFirst software this week that the company says will provide better visibility into transactions such as trade orders and new tools to meet service level agreements or promises on trade execution.

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A Partial Answer to Virtual Sprawl
September 05, 2008 @ 05:13 PM | By Penny Crosman

Since we wrote a few weeks ago about virtual sprawl, dozens of vendors have contacted us to tell us about their solutions to the problem of out-of-control virtual machine deployments and the harmful effect this can have on applications. One notable startup, BlueStripe, I expect to make a mark in this area.

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TGIF: Your IT Department
September 04, 2008 @ 10:12 PM | By Penny Crosman

IT solving problems of all kinds -- rescuing puppies, money laundering...

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E-discovery: What about blogs and wikis? (VIDEO)
September 03, 2008 @ 03:57 PM | By Melanie Rodier
Every company will almost certainly one day face the overwhelming task of answering an e-discovery request. But this is not just limited to e-mail and instant messages, says Marie-Charlotte Patterson, VP corporate marketing, AXS One. continued...
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