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Cloud Vendors: Are You Listening?
March 05, 2010 @ 12:30 PM | By Greg MacSweeney
The buzz and hype around cloud computing is practically deafening. However, despite all of the talk, users are still confused about the definition of cloud. But most important for the capital markets: cloud vendors still don’t “get it” when it comes to the regulatory and compliance concerns that most firms face on a daily basis. In fact, many capital markets executives feel that cloud vendors don’t grasp the the magnitude and severity of their security demands.
The results from a recent Wall Street & Technology Cloud Computing Survey (download here) and the following report from the Innovation Councils, a group of senior capital markets technology executives founded by Julio Gomez, echoes the concerns.
For the real scoop about what capital markets executives are saying about cloud computing, read Gomez’ take from the recent Innovation Council meeting that took place this past weekend ...
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BNY Mellon’s Successful Integration
October 19, 2009 @ 10:28 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
In case you missed it, here is a video featuring Donald Monks, Vice Chairman and Head of Integration at BNY Mellon, that focuses on the complexities — and costs — of mergers in financial services. M&A is hardly a new topic for financial services firms. However, much of a merger’s success depends on how quickly and efficiently the new bank can combine two organizations into one. Often, firms struggle to streamline information technology, resulting is duplicate systems, extra personnel and higher costs.
Monks, who headed the integration of The Bank of New York and Mellon Financial, shares his views on BNY Mellon’s successful integration. I caught up with Monks in Hong Kong this past September while at the Sibos 2009 financial services conference and he discusses where the largest cost savings can be found (infrastructure), how to control access to applications (identity management), how banks can satisfy the cost savings demands driven by shareholders, and more.
Comment on this blog entryAuthor Warns About Excessive Data Mining
August 09, 2009 @ 06:47 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist Jason Zweig interviews David Leinweber, author of "Nerds on Wall Street." Leinweber, who mentions Wall Street & Technology a couple of times in his book and also runs a few images of our covers from more than a decade ago, talks about the dangers of “over mining” data. Over analyzing data can lead to false positives and he warns that financial professionals should not torture “the data until it screams.”
Comment on this blog entryDavos Diary, Day 3: Prepare to Be Socialized for Profit
February 02, 2009 @ 08:47 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
Guest Blog Entry: by Richard Muirhead, Tideway
The fast moving wave that is social computing swept through Davos on Thursday in a session titled “Organizing the Unorganizable: Social Computing and the Enterprise.” The interactive workshop at the World Economic Forum assembled such luminaries as Paulo Coelho, Jim Schwartz, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Jimmy Wales, Matt Cohler, and Reid Hoffman, among others. The goal was to address many of the questions around social computing’s business applicability, such as: What advantages does it bring? What are its risks and how can they be mitigated? How can it support leadership, decision-making, product development and innovation? And what role does it play in investor/client relations and support?
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The Walking Zombies of Wall Street (video)
December 10, 2008 @ 08:46 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
WSJ's Dennis Berman tells colleague Evan Newmark that although tens of thousands of people have managed to hold on to their jobs, there isn't much work to go around. Instead, he says, Wall Streeters are working to appear busy. Really? Well, maybe in certain parts of the business. But after speaking with many CIOs and other technologists, they are up to their eyeballs in work and planning for 2009. And many are still trying to figure out how to complete all of the projects (which haven’t been reduced) with a smaller budget and skeleton staff.
Comments(1)Fresh Evidence That Collateral Management’s A Hit This Year
December 09, 2008 @ 03:19 PM | By Penny Crosman
We just got off the phone with John Wisbey, CEO of Lombard Risk, who told us his company has won seven new customers for its Colline Collateral Management software in the last six months. “We’re finding this year a very exciting year,” he says. This jibes with interviews we did recently with sell-side and buy-side firms that were upgrading their collateral management systems. “People are definitely interested in this. Although firms are cutting back, they’re not cutting back on reducing credit risk.” They are trying to manage credit/counterparty risk and liquidity better.
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Mumbai Financial Firms, Technology Providers Incensed After Attacks
December 05, 2008 @ 07:52 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
Last week's terror attacks rocked the Mumbai business community. Niraj Sheth, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, speaks with Tata Consultancy Services’ CEO S. Ramadorai and Ashok Wadhwa, CEO and managing director of Ambit Corporate Finance Pvt. Ltd., about how they are taking action to ensure Mumbai is both safe and business-friendly.
Wall Street Firms To Cut Additional 15% of Workforce
November 06, 2008 @ 09:20 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
In a year that has already seen thousands of layoffs on Wall Street, word is that most large firms are planning another round of cuts by year end — some headcount reductions as high as 15 percent of the workforce. The pink slips at Goldman Sachs, amounting to 10-15 percent of the workforce, could be coming as early as this week. Layoffs inside of Merrill Lynch could amount to 10,000. At Morgan Stanley, most of the cuts will likely come from inside the investment bank. Even the relatively strong JPMorgan is considering another round of substantial cuts, reports CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino in the following video clip.
Comment on this blog entryMerrill Lynch to Cut Thousands of IT and Operations Jobs
October 21, 2008 @ 10:14 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
Merrill Lynch expects to cut thousands of jobs as a result of its takeover by Bank of America, according to CEO John Thain. And most of those jobs will come from information technology, operations and "corporate functions," Thain said in a Bloomberg interview.
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HSBC Group COO Discusses Risk Management During the Financial Crisis (video)
October 16, 2008 @ 06:30 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
On the day that Lehman Brothers failed I spoke briefly with David Hodgkinson, group chief operating officer, at HSBC. Hodgkinson discusses how global banks need to work together to uncover potential risks and the role technology will play in uncovering new financial and market risks in the future. We were at the SIBOS 2008 conference in Vienna.
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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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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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Wall Street and the new iPhone 3G
July 18, 2008 @ 06:27 PM | By Melanie Rodier
You Want One, But What Does Your Boss Think?
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Citi's New CIO Faces High Expectations and High Pressure
July 09, 2008 @ 08:05 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
Not only will Citi's new CIO Marty Lippert also take on the duties of corporate operations and technology chief operating officer, but the responsibilities will come with extremely high expectations -- namely helping Citi right its ship.
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Is a Low-Energy Consumption Chip Alternative on the Horizon?
June 30, 2008 @ 12:04 PM | By Greg MacSweeney
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?
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Drop in Housing Starts Indicates Unemployment Is Headed to 9%
May 29, 2008 @ 03:09 PM | By Greg MacSweeney
Where is the economy headed? Some "experts" say the economy is ready to rebound, after a short contraction. Others think that the economy is just at the beginning of a long and painful recession. However, the truth may be hidden in data that tracks housing starts, according to University of San Francisco business professor Jon Fisher, who previously founded and sold his online authentication company Bharosa to Oracle. Fisher contends the unemployment rate may be headed to 9 percent.
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The Technology Challenges Ahead for the JPMorgan/Bear Stearns Merger
April 07, 2008 @ 11:17 AM | By Penny Crosman
Now that JPMorgan has announced that Peter Cherasia, head of global technology and operations at Bear Stearns, will stay on to manage technology, operations and real estate worldwide for JPMorgan's investment bank, he and the other surviving IT managers have a job ahead of them to merge the technology and operations of the two behemoth firms.
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Buy Side Still Laissez-Faire About Derivatives Processing
April 03, 2008 @ 10:23 AM | By Penny Crosman
La plus ca change, la plus c'est la meme chose -- when I mix my eighth-grade-level French with a report the Aite Group released this morning on buy-side OTC derivatives processing, this is what I come up with. As we reported last summer, sell-side firms (with a major push from the Fed) are working hard to automate derivatives processing; but buy-side firms are not.
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Broadridge Rolls Out Workflow for Brokerage Operations
April 01, 2008 @ 09:49 AM | By Penny Crosman
Broadridge last night unveiled the first four of a set of 16 new retail brokerage operations applications designed to automatically handle most operations tasks and route only the discrepancies to operations staff, giving them the tools to quickly research and resolve them. The four initial Ascendis applications, all based on Microsoft ASP.net and BizTalk, automate credit risk administration, corporate actions, balancing and reconciliation and dividends distribution.
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Banks Seize Web 2.0 Opportunity
March 19, 2008 @ 04:04 PM | By Melanie Rodier
Joining the ranks of a growing number of banks increasingly focusing on Web 2.0, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is targeting Facebook users by launching a financial advice blog that can be accessed through its fan page on the popular social networking site.
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Is Wall Street Ready for the iPhone?
March 17, 2008 @ 12:54 PM | By Melanie Rodier
Apple's announcement that it is now targeting its iPhone to business customers too with improved security and integration of e-mail, calendars and contact lists, has generally received positive reviews in the press. But is Wall Street ready to trade in their BlackBerrys and Treos for a more colorful iPhone?
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Doesn't Operations Deserve Some Respect?
March 06, 2008 @ 09:53 AM | By Penny Crosman
In news accounts about Societe Generale's recent trading fiasco, there were mentions of how the operations department was called "the mine" and all Jerome Kerviel wanted was to get out of there and become a trader. The International Herald Tribune reported that in 2006, a man working in Societe Generale's back office operations killed himself on a suburban train. This made me wonder -- is it time for a change in the way operations is viewed? Maybe the people responsible for settling billions of dollars worth of trades shouldn't be abused or treated like peons.
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Online Investment Site Cake Moves into Facebook
February 27, 2008 @ 12:18 PM | By Melanie Rodier
Cake Financial, the social network investment service that lets investors track and share the performance of their actual brokerage accounts, has launched a Facebook application.
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Wachovia Improves Its Forex App Response Time 33%
February 14, 2008 @ 02:52 PM | By Penny Crosman
Wachovia's investment bank had a problem: foreign exchange customers were complaining about platform performance issues. "Foreign exchange is not a good place to have performance issues -- not when you like to retain customers," notes Jim Hirschauer, architecture manager and technical expert for the corporate and investment banking technology division of Wachovia.
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What is the banking future of Second Life?
February 13, 2008 @ 12:10 PM | By Melanie Rodier
Dutch banking group ING is closing the online community it launched in the virtual Second Life world last year.
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Capital Markets Firms to Spend $41.8 Billion on IT in 2008, Aite Says
February 05, 2008 @ 03:03 PM | By Penny Crosman
Aite Group put out a new, optimistic IT spending report for the capital markets yesterday that, like the Wall Street & Technology IT spending survey that we released in November, predicts an increase in IT spending of just under 10% for 2008, as well as for the ensuing years through 2011. (By contrast, a more conservative Celent report anticipated only a 4% rise in spending this year, to $36.2 billion.)
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Wall Street Firms Weather Massive Internet Outage
January 31, 2008 @ 03:49 PM | By Penny Crosman
Although damaged cables under the Mediterranean Sea shut down or severely slowed down internet service today across India, Egypt and the Middle East, Wall Street firms with IT staff and outsourcing projects in India seem to have been been well served by their network backups.
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How Intel Plans to Save $1 Billion on Its Data Centers
January 23, 2008 @ 03:47 PM | By Penny Crosman
Who doesn't want to make their data centers more cost-effective? When we asked sell-side firms recently where in IT they would most increase spending in 2008, 82.4 percent said "data center infrastructure" -- this ranked far above any other item on our list. That's why we thought we share with you some highlights of a report Intel released this week that details how it avoided spending $30 million on its data centers in 2007 and how it plans to achieve nominal cost savings of $1 billion over the course of eight years.
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New Xignite Platform Helps Developers Combine Web Services into Applications
January 16, 2008 @ 10:43 AM | By Penny Crosman
For all their benefits (including reusability and flexibility), one downside of services-oriented architecture is the painstaking work of knitting together reams of web services every time you want to build a new application. Xignite yesterday introduced for its customers a simple platform for mashing or “splicing” web services together, called Splice Studio.
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Wall Street Firms to Spend $38.2 Billion on IT in 2009, Says Celent
January 02, 2008 @ 11:50 AM | By Penny Crosman
Are Wall Street firms going to significantly increase IT spending in the coming year, as a Wall Street & Technology survey conducted last fall indicated, or will the subprime-related losses force those budgets to be slashed? A new report from Celent stakes a conservative middle ground -- it predicts IT spending for North American securities and investment firms in 2008 and 2009 will grow 4% over 2006 and 2007 levels.
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Remote Desktops Coming to Wall Street in 2008
December 18, 2007 @ 04:53 PM | By Penny Crosman
Here's a prediction for the coming year: remote desktopping -- in other words, moving desktop CPUs off (or out from under) desks and into racks, data centers and closets -- will hit the Street in force some time in 2008, or maybe 2009. Wachovia has already said they're kitting out the new trading floor in their under-construction Charlotte headquarters with remote desktops (or "back-racked PCs" as they call them), which will open in 2009, and the inventors of the latest generation of remote desktop technology, Teradici, say that 20 Wall Street firms have expressed interest in it.
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Platform Computing Lets Quants, Developers Quickly Put Apps On A Grid
December 03, 2007 @ 12:35 PM | By Penny Crosman
"Quants can wear pants to work now," says Martin Harris, product manager at Platform Computing, citing this as one of the benefits of the Symphony 4 grid computing solution his company announced today. Before, he explains, quants at many firms had to wear shorts because they had so many CPUs under their desk that all ran hot.
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Fully Equipped NYC Offices to Be Offered to Startup Hedge Funds
November 27, 2007 @ 09:54 AM | By Penny Crosman
For startup hedge funds and existing hedge funds that would like to have an office in New York City, Eze Castle Integration announced today it's going to start offering "managed suites" at 529 Fifth Avenue and 44th Street (near Grand Central Station) early next year. The company will provide office space, computers loaded with basic office software, market data feeds, Blackberry services, a telecom infrastructure, conference rooms, a receptionist, a 24x7 help desk, a shared data center, disaster recovery via data replication to Eze Castle's Boston data center and even trial-level versions of software from Capital IQ, MarketStream and others.
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Intel's Newest Transistors Are 20% Faster, Use 30% Less Energy
November 12, 2007 @ 10:47 AM | By Penny Crosman
Intel this morning introduced a series of dual-core and quad-core server processors that run faster and consume less energy than previous versions. The new Intel Xeon 5400 server chipset can achieve front side bus speeds up to 1600MHz yet consumes only 80 watts of power.
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Most Financial Institutions Will Be Green By 2012, Gartner Says
November 07, 2007 @ 04:45 PM | By Penny Crosman
In a research note released today, Richard J. De Lotto, principal analyst, banking industry advisory services at Gartner, declared that financial firms will step up their focus on green IT through 2012. "Environmental issues will rise up on political, media, enterprise, investor and consumer agendas through 2012," he stated in the note. "The financial services industries will not escape this profound change in stakeholder focus, and their IT departments will bear the brunt of the impact.
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Carnegie Mellon, General Motors Roll Out Best Practices Model for Buying Software
November 07, 2007 @ 02:43 PM | By Penny Crosman
Although they don't like to be considered "CMMI zealots," most major Wall Street firms use CMMI methods for software development and require outsourcers to do the same. Today, Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute, with help from top IT executives at General Motors, the Department of Defense and the Government Accountability Office, rolled out an extension to CMMI, called CMMI for Acquisition, that provides a framework, a standard and a common language for buying (rather than developing) software.
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Colombia Stock Exchange Builds A Scalable SOA Platform
November 01, 2007 @ 11:15 AM | By Penny Crosman
Although its climate is hotter, its industries more diverse and its market smaller, in some respects the Colombia Stock Exchange looks like any U.S. or European exchange. It grapples with the same technology issues -- such as how to get data latency below a few milliseconds and how to build an IT infrastructure that can easily scale and withstand market volatility and surges - that plague any exchange or firm with a large trading floor.
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Data Centers Are Understaffed, Over Budget and Breaking Their SLAs, Survey Finds
October 30, 2007 @ 03:20 PM | By Penny Crosman
Cutting costs and consolidating/virtualizing servers are top priorities for data center managers, who are struggling mightily to meet service level agreements and staff their data centers properly, according to a study Symantec released today. The company polled 800 data center managers at very large, Global 2000 companies who manage an average of 14 data centers each. (Although it's probably better known as a security vendor, Symantec's acquisitions of Altiris and Veritas have turned it into a data center infrastructure provider). Among these data center operators, about one-fifth of whom work for financial companies, data center expenses are growing rapidly – 69% said their expenses were growing at least five percent a year and 11% reported growth of 20 percent or more per year. Although these respondents also reported budget increases – an average of 7.1% -- the 3% inflation rate means these budgets are not keeping pace. These managers also stated that IT spends more than two-thirds of its budget in the data center.
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John Hancock's Outsourcing SMA Ops to JPMorgan A Sign of the Times
October 25, 2007 @ 09:47 AM | By Penny Crosman
When insurance company John Hancock announced this week that it's outsourcing its separately managed accounts administration to JPMorgan, we saw this as a reflection of three trends: separately managed accounts have become very popular, good operations staff have become hard to find, and firms that experience growth in an investment area are tending to outsource operations for it.
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Wachovia Greens Its Data Centers
October 24, 2007 @ 10:13 AM | By Penny Crosman
Wachovia has just completed a state-of-the-art data center in the Birmingham, AL area and is 18 months into a 36-month effort to relocate and overhaul many of its data centers for the dual purposes of reducing energy consumption and achieving geographic diversity. "We are being smarter about how we deploy data centers and using technology that's more efficient in terms of power consumption, heat dissipation and cooling," says Thomas Caddoo, vice president, Corporate and Investment Banking Technology at Wachovia. "The big drain is cooling. If you can use technology that dissipates heat out of the main data center environment and into an environment where it can be recirculated or even expelled out of the building, that puts a little less strain on the actual cooling, the HVAC system."
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Merrill Lynch Rolls Out Middle Office Outsourcing to Hedge Funds
October 19, 2007 @ 05:48 PM | By Penny Crosman
As we reported back in January, hedge funds are eager to outsource their middle- and back office functions, due to the growing complexity of these functions as hedge funds grow and offer more exotic products, as well as the difficulties of dealing with corporate actions regulations and Sarbanes-Oxley. Surveys over the last couple of years have shown that hedge funds are planning to spend high proportions of their budgets on experienced third party providers.
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Intel's vPro Provides Remote Support for PCs Even If They're Turned Off
October 10, 2007 @ 10:36 AM | By Penny Crosman
At an event yesterday, Intel ran demonstrations of its new vPro chip for business PCs that's starting to be packaged in Dell and HP computers (and will soon be embedded in laptops). The vPro chip contains what Intel calls Active Management Technology that allows computers to be set up, fixed and managed remotely, even if the computers themselves are turned off. This means an IT person in Omaha could troubleshoot and fix the computer problems of a hedge fund manager in Greenwich, CT, even at 3:00 a.m. while the manager is asleep and his PC unplugged or crashed.
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Lloyds TSB to Outsource Back Office to Wachovia
October 01, 2007 @ 08:14 PM | By Cory Levine
Last week Wachovia and Lloyds TSB Bank announced that Wachovia's Hong Kong operation will take over trade back office processing from the UK bank. Details of the agreement were not released, but Wachovia did reveal that by early next year, it will fully take over trade processing.
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Second Life: Financial Services Firms Continue to Move In, now with New Credit Card
September 07, 2007 @ 04:29 PM | By Melanie Rodier
The financial services world continues to expand in Second Life.
Singapore-based financial firm First Meta has just launched Second Life’s first credit card.
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More than 75 Percent of Financial Companies Now Offshoring, Saving $9 bln
June 26, 2007 @ 02:53 PM | By Melanie Rodier
Financial services firms continue to lead the way in offshoring. More than 75 percent of global financial institutions now have operations offshore, compared to less than 10 percent in 2001. And it is no longer just IT departments that are being outsourced: transaction processing, finance, HR, investment banking analytics and research, are all increasingly heading overseas.
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Aite Appoints Valentine as Senior Analyst
June 14, 2007 @ 05:33 PM | By Melanie Rodier
With the aim of boosting its analysis of buy-side technology issues, Boston-based think tank Aite Group has appointed industry expert Denise Valentine as a senior analyst.
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Instinet Sees Shakeup at the Top, CEOs Resign
June 11, 2007 @ 09:54 PM | By Cory Levine
Interagency broker Instinet, a subsidiary of Nomura Holdings, Inc. will see three of its top leaders step down in a major overhaul of the boardroom. The firm announced last week that co-CEOs John Fay and Alex Goor will pursue other interests, while Chairman Ed Nicoll is stepping down from his post, and is in negotiations for a special advisor position.
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BEA Debuts Server For Low-Latency Java Apps
May 31, 2007 @ 03:31 PM | By Penny Crosman
“People aren’t coming out of college knowing C and C++, they’re coming out with Java degrees,” says Guy Churchward, vice president of WebLogic Products at BEA Systems. That’s part of the reasoning behind BEA’s announcement this week of WebLogic Real Time 2.0, an application server that offers microsecond latency for Java applications.
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HP Shows Off High-Tech Videoconferencing
May 29, 2007 @ 02:14 PM | By Penny Crosman
Although I'm not a fan of the word "telepresence" -- for me it conjures up strange images of Teletubbies and seances -- a Wall Street executive told me last week that his firm was taking a serious look at telepresence, meaning a type of presence awareness technology. So when HP invited me to a telepresence demo they were running uptown this afternoon, I accepted. I was a bit surprised to be ushered into a soundproof studio and sit facing a wall of high-definition monitors broadcasting live images of HP executives in London, Georgia, and California, all staring straight at me (and vice versa). I was filled with questions (why did I wear this outfit? why did I agree to a videoconferencing demo when I have 17,000 things to do back at the office?), but I have to admit the technology was impressive. The video quality and display were extremely clear -- the California executives placed a bar chart under a document camera and I could read very small numbers on it. The sound and video were perfectly synchronized -- a welcome change from the last time I saw a videoconferencing demo, in which the voices and moving mouths were comically (and distractingly) misaligned. Several people could also talk at once in different locations and all be heard.
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New York to Test Super Power Grid
May 23, 2007 @ 11:12 AM | By Penny Crosman
Since we issued dire warnings about the viability of New York City's power grid during the coming summer months in our June issue (Don't Panic, But the Grid's Going Down), we learned this week that the Department of Homeland Security and Consolidated Edison are testing a potential solution. The DHS project will invest $39.3 million over the next four years in new superconductor cables that are designed to prevent blackouts caused by power surges.
"This is about Wall Street, this is about making the electric grid for the financial capital of the world ... more defensible against potential problems," stated Jay M. Cohen, undersecretary for science and technology at DHS.
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Inside IBM’s $1 Billion Green Data Center Initiative
May 10, 2007 @ 06:28 PM | By Penny Crosman
Today, IBM announced that it is redirecting $1 billion per year toward increasing energy efficiency in IT. Every so often IBM announces that it’s redirecting $1 billion toward something – for instance, in 2006 it was information management, in 2001 it was Linux – and thus pumping up existing software and services in the category and adding new ones. Today’s announcement shows that Big Blue has a strong interest in being perceived as green.
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Wall Street and DTCC Bring Derivatives Processing into 21st Century
April 30, 2007 @ 03:44 PM | By Penny Crosman
At the SIFMA show today, Frank De Maria, global head of derivative client services and operations at Merrill Lynch, offered an interesting quote from Alan Greenspan, made six weeks ago: “I was shocked to find credit derivatives settlement and clearing operated with 19th century technology.” He was talking about trades being handled by phone, fax and paper. De Maria then Googled other 19th century inventions and found the stapler, barbed wire, dynamite and the zipper among them. Point being, it's time for modernization. Merrill Lynch and 13 other Wall Street firms have been working with the DTCC to build a data warehouse for derivatives, such that all derivatives trading data are in one place and there's one "golden copy" of every trade record.
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SIFMA Ops Show Opens With Merger Update
April 30, 2007 @ 01:14 PM | By Penny Crosman
It's the first day of the SIFMA Operations Conference here in sunny, 90-degrees Orlando, FL, although as several of this morning's speakers noted, you wouldn't know it because of the sealed, artificial air-conditioned environment we're in. But don't pity us poor conference-goers -- many of the 700 attendees golfed all day yesterday and last night's outdoor cocktail reception on a patio of the Gaylord Palms Resort featured perfect, low-humidity weather, a steel drum band, a generous open bar, crab cakes and sushi. This morning, Ellyn McColgan, president of distribution and operations at Fidelity Investments and co-chair of SIFMA's Board of Directors gave an update on SIFMA's activities and the progress made in integrating the Securities Industry Association and the Bond Market Association, which was approved in 2006.
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Tidbits from Today’s Linux on Wall Street Show
April 23, 2007 @ 06:40 PM | By Penny Crosman
At the Linux on Wall Street show today at the Roosevelt Hotel, there was much discussion of the increasing use of the Linux open-source operating system and open source in general on the Street, which is being driven partly by the desire to cut costs and partly by the appeal of particular applications that happen to be open source. “Companies look at, does this solve my business problem, regardless of whether it’s open source,” says Monica Kumar, senior director of product marketing, Linux and open source at Oracle. For instance, while Eclipse open-source development tools are popular on the Street, open-source CRM and ERP are not (and there are few open-source offerings in these categories). Here are a few things I learned at the show today:
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IBM Wants to Cure Your Server Sprawl
April 23, 2007 @ 06:15 AM | By Penny Crosman
When Scott Handy, IBM’s vice president worldwide marketing and strategy for System p, says he likes to evangelize, he’s kidding. But although his delivery is low-key, evangelize he does. In his core message, you and I are not going to hell, but Sun Microsystems’ Solaris server sales might be. After assuring us that the “p” in System p stands for “performance,” Handy told us what’s new with System p, including IBM’s announcement this morning that x86 Red Hat and Novell Linux [the open source Unix-like operating system] applications can now run on it. What is in this for you? It’s another option for server consolidation.
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IT Performance Strongly Affects the Bottom Line, Survey Finds
April 17, 2007 @ 03:35 PM | By Penny Crosman
If you’re an IT executive, stand tall – you’re more important than you (and others) may give yourself credit for. According to the partial results of a survey of 220 senior executives and IT managers released today, IT performance is absolutely critical to overall revenue. The study, which was commissioned by business service management software vendor Managed Objects, found that 66% of senior executives think IT systems are so important that “we can’t earn our revenue at all without them running properly” and an additional 27% feel that revenue would slow significantly if key systems weren’t accessible (another 6% said productivity would be reduced by IT problems).
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Time for Fresh Thinking on Data Center Management
April 12, 2007 @ 12:00 PM | By Penny Crosman
This morning, I dropped in on the thinktank: data center Expert Series Tour our sister publication Network Computing is running; today’s event was at the posh St. Regis Hotel in New York City (my clothes are almost starting to dry). Art Wittmann, Network Computing’s Editor in Chief, zeroed in on some of the key issues facing data managers and executives trying to efficiently run data centers today. Most of the attendees had plans to build new data centers or remodel existing ones. Wittmann pointed out that although Gartner predicts IT spending will increase about 3.8% this year, that’s not a huge increase compared to the exploding growth in data center servers, cooling and power needs. He then offered suggestions for keeping costs down while maintaining data center expansion and performance.
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Citi Restructuring Focuses on Cutting IT Costs, Jobs
April 11, 2007 @ 08:59 PM | By Cory Levine
Citi laid out its plans for a major restructuring as anticipated this morning. The financial supermarket expects to realize an extraordinary $2.1 billion in savings this year, which it expects to grow further, reaching $4.6 billion in 2009. While this news is stellar for shareholders, it is a dispiriting announcement for the bank's IT workers, as much of the savings will come from job cuts.
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Hosting Comes to Email and Document Archiving
April 04, 2007 @ 05:25 PM | By Penny Crosman
The boom in hosted software is spilling over into email and electronic records archival. EDS and AXS-One announced last week that EDS will provide hosting for AXS-One’s Compliance Platform, which stores electronic documents, emails, instant messages, reports, SAP data and desktop files according to predefined compliance policies. The software is designed to meet the requirements of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
Hosted archiving in theory provides instant usability and scalability, that's why many companies ship their back files out to Iron Mountain and others. In this case, users can log onto the web-based AXS-One Content Portal and search and retrieve files of all kinds. For instance, they can readily search Lotus Notes emails and view retrieved emails with search terms highlighted.
Comments(2)Blackberrys That Never Fail
March 20, 2007 @ 11:31 AM | By Penny Crosman
Crackberry addicts who can’t put their PDAs down can now buy assurance that they’ll never have to -- for technical reasons, anyway. Neverfail, Austin, TX, today announced the first-ever failover solution for Blackberry email and mobile data system applications (called Neverfail for Blackberry Enterprise Server). Why didn’t such Blackberry backup exist before? “Making applications cluster-aware isn’t a simple task,” says John Posavatz, vice president, product management at Neverfail Group, Austin, TX. The company partnered with RIM to develop replication and failover for Blackberry applications on a secondary server, and it already offered continuous protection for the Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino servers that often serve Blackberrys. The solution also monitors the servers for clues to potential problems in an effort to fix problems before having to fail over.
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Many Private Banks Still Handle Trades Manually, Study Says, But So What?
March 12, 2007 @ 04:53 PM | By Penny Crosman
A study published today on the trade processing practices of 32 private banks in the U.S., Switzerland, and the U.K. has found that nearly 30% of private banks lack back-office automation. The study, conducted by wealth management consultancy Scorpio Partnership and commissioned by post trade management services vendor Omgeo, found that many private banks still telephone orders to a third-party broker and handle the confirmation and affirmation processes via email or fax, leading to delays of up to two days. U.S. private banks were found to be more automated -- seven of the nine U.S. survey respondents had electronic connections with their brokers. It was the Swiss banks – eight of the 12 surveyed – who were mostly handling trades manually.
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Sun Microsystem’s Data Center Container Makes its New York Debut
March 05, 2007 @ 05:32 PM | By Penny Crosman
Pedestrians walking past the Vanderbilt Avenue and 42nd Street entrance to New York City’s Grand Central Station passed an unusual sight this afternoon – a huge truck draped in a black plastic tarp boasting Sun Microsystems’ logo, housing a 20-foot-long container full of server racks. 
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Straight Talk About the Cost of Doing Nothing
February 21, 2007 @ 05:54 PM | By Penny Crosman
What’s the cost of disorganized data on Wall Street? A portion of our cover package this month on The Cost of Doing Nothing was inspired by former Tower Group analyst and current SVP of enterprise data management software company Golden Source, Tim Lind, who knows a thing or two about the state of data in major firms. He shared some insightful and irreverent thoughts with us recently on the dangers of not managing data properly.
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Credit Suisse Outsources its Network Managers
February 13, 2007 @ 04:35 PM | By Penny Crosman
As part of its ongoing effort to cut costs, Credit Suisse signed a deal today to outsource its entire voice and data network management infrastructure to BT and Swisscom. Under the $1.1 billion contract, 231 employees and 50 contractors will be transferred to BT. The contract has a minimum five-year term with the option of extending the term to seven years and encompasses Credit Suisse's enterprise and financial trading environments.
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Easing the Pain of Financial Reporting (Well, the Data Preparation and Publishing Part, Anyway)
February 09, 2007 @ 10:28 AM | By Penny Crosman
At most Wall Street firms, the preparing of quarterly and annual reports is a tense, stressful time of Excel files being emailed back and forth and behind-closed-door meetings at which financial numbers are presented, reviewed and approved. Two products aim to help walk you through this process, automatically routing data to the right people and acquiring their approvals (using electronic signatures), providing the controls that Sarbanes-Oxley and accounting practices require, and producing statements for the SEC in the necessary Word and XBRL formats (as well as PDF and Excel).
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Data Silos Begone
February 05, 2007 @ 05:00 PM | By Penny Crosman
Recently we caught up with Joe Morant, managing director of Citisoft, a Boston- and London-based consultancy that works with large investment firms, and he shared his views on Wall Street’s data challenges. Here are excerpts from our conversation.
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Bank of America Adds Clout to Thomson's Triparty Repo Market; "Bright Pool" Becoming An Ocean
January 24, 2007 @ 04:57 PM | By Penny Crosman
When Bank of America announced yesterday that it's joining Thomson TradeWeb's online Triparty Repo marketplace, which already includes Barclays Capital, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and UBS and sees average daily trading volumes of $60 billion, it may have provoked a shiver of fear and dread among independent repo dealers. TradeWeb Repo is an electronic trading platform for the tri-party repurchase agreement (repo) market; participant dealers use the online platform to offer repos to their institutional clients and provide straight-through processing.
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FSA: U.K. Will Be OK in Flu Pandemic
November 28, 2006 @ 10:37 AM | By Cory Levine
Cory Levine, Wall Street & Technology
While I was eating leftover turkey last week, London's Financial Services Authority (FSA) completed a resiliency test of its financial markets and found that in the event of a bird flu pandemic, the backbone of the U.K. economy would be able to continue operating.
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Trace Financial Completes Corporate Actions Data Feed
November 14, 2006 @ 11:15 AM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
Trace Financial today announced that its Corporate Actions Management Systems solutions, CAMS and CAMS Connect, have successfully tested and taken in Reuters Datascope in order to include corporate actions data feeds.
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GemStone Bolsters IBM Platform With Virtualization Solution
November 08, 2006 @ 10:35 AM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
Enterprise data solutions provider GemStone Systems recently announced that it will deliver xFire distributed data management and virtualization solution on the IBM BladeCenter Platform .
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Deutsche Bank Uses Princeton Softech to Monitor Application Performance
November 08, 2006 @ 10:03 AM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
In an effort to better manage the growth of its enterprise application performance levels, Deutsche Bank has selected the Optim solution from Princeton Softech. Optim allows organizations such as Deutsche Bank to apply a consistent enterprise data management strategy across applications, platforms and databases.
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BNY ConvergEx Group Introduces Commission Management Solution
October 31, 2006 @ 11:57 AM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
Agency brokerage and investment technology solutions provider ConvergEx Group recently announced the launch of SHAREx, its solution for commission sharing arrangements for the investment management community. SHAREx is one of the key offerings of BNY, ConvergEx Group's commission management model, enabling clients to manage commissions more efficiently by consolidating broker research payments with execution expertise.
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The EDM Council Derives Data Management Plan of Action
October 25, 2006 @ 10:34 AM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
On the heels of a research project involving 60 industry representatives, The EDM Council has identified, categorized and analyzed the Enterprise Data Management (EDM) issues of most concern to its members.
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National Bank of Slovakia Selects WallStreet Systems to Streamline Ops
October 25, 2006 @ 10:19 AM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
In an effort to better manage its front-, middle- and back-office banking functions, The National Bank of Slovakia (NBS) recently selected the Treasury TremaSuite 6.5 from Wall Street Systems.
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Industry Passes BCP Test, but Uncertainty Lingers
October 20, 2006 @ 01:58 PM | By Cory Levine
Cory Levine, Wall Street & Technology
The securities industry underwent a simulated business continuity planning (BCP) test last Saturday, October 14 conducted by the Securities Industry Association, the Bond Market Association, the Futures Industry Association and the Financial Information Forum. The test was similar to a BCP test held a year ago, but industry participation was up, with over 250 securities firms, exchanges, markets, service bureaus and industry utilities testing the functionality of backup data centers, work centers and communication links.
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Xcitek Launches Enhanced Cost Basis Tool
October 19, 2006 @ 12:17 PM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
Xcitek, a provider of market data, corporate actions software and consulting services, recently announced the deployment of a new Web platform for its Cost Basis Service.
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CitiStreet Deploys Host Intrusion Defense System
October 18, 2006 @ 03:49 PM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
CitiStreet recently deployed host intrusion defense system from Third Brigade, a security software company.
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BATS Trading Warns of Spikes in Market Data Messages
October 17, 2006 @ 12:04 PM | By Ivy Schmerken
Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
BATS Trading, operator of BATS (Better Alternative Trading System) ECN, warned participants that receive the BATS PITCH market data that it expects message activity levels to increase — partly due to systems changes related to Reg NMS — and customers may want to increase their bandwidth.
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Archive Systems Forms Alliance With Global Realty Outsourcing
October 10, 2006 @ 10:09 AM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
Archive Systems, a provider of on-demand document management services, and Global Realty Outsourcing (GRO), a business process outsourcing (BPO) provider, have formed a strategic alliance to leverage their respective onshore and offshore capabilities.
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Message Automation Releases Derivatives STP Solution
October 10, 2006 @ 09:55 AM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
Message Automation recently announced the availability of its Derivatives STP solution, which enables the straight-through processing (STP) of Over-the-Counter (OTC) derivatives using FpML-based technology. It helps financial firms overcome issues such as a lack of bilateral communications, low levels of data accuracy, high levels of manual processing, large processing costs and lengthy time to bring new instruments to market.
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Jupiter Asset Management Creates STP Hub
October 10, 2006 @ 09:38 AM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
In an effort to boost straight-through processing (STP) efforts, Jupiter Asset Management has successfully implemented the CheckFree TradeFlow solution as a centralized STP hub. The new platform will help Jupiter improve operational efficiency, manage increased trade volumes and enable business expansion without adding significantly to investment administration costs.
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Securities Messaging Traffic Growing 31 Percent Annually on SWIFT
October 09, 2006 @ 01:16 AM | By Greg MacSweeney
By Greg MacSweeney, Wall Street & Technology
Although securities messaging traffic has grown to 45 percent of overall SWIFT message traffic and has an average annual growth of more than 30 percent per year during the past 10 years, said Leonard Schrank, CEO, SWIFT, at the Sibos 2006 conference in Sydney, SWIFT is still having a difficult time attracting asset managers to the SWIFT community. By comparison, payments has grown 13 percent annually during the same time period.
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Commission Recapture Kicks Into Overdrive
October 05, 2006 @ 09:51 AM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark and Ivy Schmerken, Wall Street & Technology
In the October issue of Wall Street & Technology, we explored the practice of commission recapture in the article “A Hard Act to Follow.” The catalyst for that story was derived from an insightful roundtable discussion that BNY Securities Group subsidiary Lynch, Jones & Ryan hosted with a handful of other commission recapture players. The general consensus from that meeting and in follow-up discussions indicated that commission recapture, while still a viable means to generate returns, would one day become obsolete, especially since players such as UBS and Goldman Sachs shuttered their commission recapture operations, deeming it an industry in decline.
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Thomson Offers ‘Whistle Blower’ Technology to Clients
October 04, 2006 @ 12:14 PM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
Thomson Financial has partnered with enterprise feedback management provider Allegiance to supply ethics reporting and whistle blower technology to Thomson Financial’s corporate clients through the Thomson’s Corporate Governance Reporting Solution.
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SunGard, Satyam Prepare for Disaster
September 27, 2006 @ 10:01 AM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
In an effort to help companies minimize the risks to business and information technology (IT) operations created by influenza pandemics and other catastrophic events, SunGard Availability Services and Satyam plan to release new solutions aimed at retaining business continuity in times of crisis. Also, to demonstrate some of its capabilities, Satyam completed a three-day mock drill that simulated a disaster in three Indian cities.
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T-Zero Surpasses 100 Clients
September 21, 2006 @ 09:59 AM | By Tim Clark
By Tim Clark, Wall Street & Technology
T-Zero, a credit derivative affirmation and connectivity provider recently announced that more than 100 buy side firms have signed on to use its services. Launched just over a year ago, T-Zero was expected to hit the 100 client goal by year end, but strong interest by the buy side is resulting in a substantially faster sign-up rate.
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