Wall Street & Technology's SIFMA TMC Weblog

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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%).

For the past four years, a team of 70 engineers in IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y. has been working on an ultra-powerful, large-scale (as in petabytes of data) stream processing system, currently running on 800 x86 computers with embedded Cell processors, that can analyze in real time massive volumes of market data and news (as well as medical, seismic, astrological or any other type of data). At the SIFMA show this week, IBM talked about this “mature prototype,” called System S, which Wall Street firms will one day be able to use to create a no-holds-barred environment in which their quants can roam free, testing ideas, finding correlations and refining algorithms, using a huge pipeline of streaming data and seeing instant results. A government agency is already using System S and IBM has filed 400 patents for it. The reason IBM talked this project up at SIFMA is because it's interested in working with capital markets firms on pilots to see what System S could do for them.

At yesterday’s SIFMA conference, Duncan Niederauer, President and Co Chief Operating Officer NYSE Euronext, began his talk with the idea that exchanges are technology companies that rely on the business side and IT working in synch. He even invited attendees to leave a business card on the way out, noting that he’s “looking to hire technology talent.” Niederauer who joined NYSE Euronext only eight weeks ago from Goldman Sachs, where he was a managing director and co-head of the equity division’s execution services franchise, offered an update on where the exchange conglomerate stands today and where it’s headed.

MFS Investment Management, a Boston-based asset management firm, and Actuate, a business intelligence software vendor, announced today at the SIFMA show that MFS has been using Actuate’s Enterprise Reporting Application Platform to build automated reports in three areas of the firm and will continue to create more.

Connotate Technologies, a New Jersey-based Web mining company, has launched its new Information Agent Community GEN2.0 at the SIFMA TMC show.

The upgraded solution, a scalable platform based on Connotate’s web mining technologies, provides Wall Street firms with intelligent agents that can interact with the Web and intranets, 24 hours a day, in a Web 2.0 environment.

Investment banks, hedge funds, broker/dealers and asset managers are actively seeking data consistency, according to a survey released by reference data management vendor GoldenSource and consulting firm A-Team this week at the SIFMA show. "We're seeing an evolution in the market," says Paul Kennedy, vice president of product management at GoldenSource. "Firms are seeing data management as more than a technology issue, but becoming more of a business and process issue."

As enterprise instant messaging continues to grow in popularity, Reuters is making a bid to become a one-stop shop for real-time collaboration and compliance, launching its Reuters Messaging Compliance Manager (RMCM) at the SIFMA show.

StreamBase, a provider of complex event processing tools, has made several announcements at the SIFMA show this week, including a major upgrade of its basic platform and joint development work with Microsoft, IBM and Sybase. First of all, StreamBase has transformed its development environment to be based on the Eclipse open source software framework. This will let developers writing applications in StreamBase easily incorporate Eclipse, Java and StreamSQL plug-ins into their work.

The cost of energy skyrocketed from 2005 to 2006 in the tri-state area, especially on Long Island, with energy costs increasing 85 percent. For financial firms, the additional energy costs could amount to millions of dollars per year, depending on the size of their data centers in and around Manhattan.

Although the number of exhibits listed on this year’s SIFMA Technology Management conference show floor map is down approximately 12 percent from the 2006 SIA Technology Management conference map, there are a record number of exhibitors and attendees at the conference.

With brokers sponsoring low-touch trading for their correspondents and buy-side clients, Fidessa (Booth # 3400) announced the U.S. launch of a global direct liquidity access (DLA) service at the SIFMA show. Fidessa Global DLA offers enhanced risk management and client monitoring capabilities.

The DLA offering will offer direct-market access across all exchanges and all markets worldwide, according to Martin Hakker, EVP Marketing at Fidessa.

Two things that are sometimes at odds: the need for investment bankers, traders, research analysts and others to share information about deals, companies, markets etc., and the need for Chinese Walls that prevent information from being inappropriately shared among different sides of the business.

Enter Parlano’s announcement today at the SIFMA show that its MindAlign persistent group chat product, which runs on Microsoft Live Communications Server and provides secure chat rooms for specific topics, now has pre-built integrations with compliance solutions that enforce e-communications rules and policies including archival. “Our customers used to have to write code and an interface to layer compliance and archival products on MindAlign,” says Jeff Schultz, vice president of Parlano. “We’ve done the integration and the XML mapping for them.” XML transformation takes care of one of the trickiest aspects of data integration – defining common tagging and data formats that allow data to be shared. The adaptors announced today link to compliance software from Akonix, Assentor and Facetime. Parlano plans to announce additional pre-packaged compliance adapters in the near future.

It is a multi-billion dollar industry. Today’s IT attacks are regional, targeted, going after specific people and companies in the world, and entirely driven by profit, according to David Rand, CTO of security firm Trend Micro.

“Yesterday's hacker was typically aged 15 to 34, had no girlfriend and was living with his parents. This is no longer true today,” Rand told the audience at the SIFMA trade show.

This morning, Novell introduced three developments calculated to appeal to its Wall Street audience at the SIFMA show. First, the company says it will have a maintenance release for Suse Linux Enterprise Real-Time (affectionately referred to by company executives as SLERT) ready in early July. SLERT is an add-in to Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise 10 open source operating system that is said to provide real-time performance for certain processes. According to Novell, SLERT provides predictable interrupt response time of less than 30 microseconds, high-resolution timer support for enhanced scheduling, user-level control of simultaneous multithreading, and processor shielding. The July maintenance update will inherit the improvements delivered with the recently launched Service Pack 1 for SUSE Linux Enterprise, including new high availability storage and processor support. The update will also incorporate support for the latest open source InfiniBand software stack, Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution 1.2, an emerging industry standard for server and storage connectivity.

Tim Lind, previously SVP of product management and strategy at GoldenSource, has joined Omgeo as managing director, strategic planning. Lind, who will report directly to president and CEO Marianne Brown, says he will be responsible for working with many areas within Omgeo, including sales and product management, and will be tasked with searching for areas of growth, particularly in certain types of derivatives where post-trade confirmations are alarmingly slow.

For some IT executives, the idea of removing all desktop computers to the back office (leaving users with screens and keyboards) is an elusive ideal. In such a state, personal computer support could be provided remotely staff through software, IT staff would never have to deal with a single aggravated user or even trouble-shoot an individual machine – they could simply switch the user to a different PC blade or portion of pooled PC resources. No one would be able to steal data from or tamper with hard drives without getting through data center security first. And if the PCs in the data center are shared and virtualized, fewer CPUs need to be purchased and power and cooling costs for desktop computers should drop. Several vendors over the years have offered variations on this theme. Wyse and Neoware have offered thin-client computing, in which most processing takes place on the server and only small portions of code are downloaded to the desktop, for several years and two years ago, Ardence (now owned by Citrix) introduced software streaming that breaks operating systems and applications into small chunks and feeds them over any network on demand.

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