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Aqua, the new electronic equities trading platform that will be launched later this year by electronic dealing network eSpeed, named Brian Weston as its new chief technology officer. Previously, Weston was SVP of eSpeed, where he oversaw development of several bond trading systems.

"For me, this is a change in paradigm from building a system that can manage hundreds of thousands of requests a second to [building] a new system that will be handling a small number of large block orders and at the same time improving the user's trading experience," Weston says.

Weston adds that his experience at Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg has prepared him for the huge development project he is undertaking in his new role. Weston helped build an event manager for Goldman in 1992 and the company's Omni middle-office system in 1995, both of which are still in use. "The front office was creating new derivatives on the fly and we needed a middle office that could handle these new kinds of derivatives," he recalls. In 2000, Weston was lead designer, architect and implementer for Bloomberg's Global Tradebook for international equities.