Microsoft is making a run at financial services businesses, and cloud is a huge part of their strategy. The more I speak with them the more I realized they can’t be ignored and not all clouds are created equal:
Microsoft’s Windows HPC Server, as its cloud computing offering, may still function best on Microsoft or .Net tools, but the vendor has been figuring out how to transform this, according to Kevin McPartland, senior analyst at consultancy Tabb Group. “They have made it pretty clear that this is going to be a big focus for them,” he says. “Anytime Microsoft says that, people need to pay attention because they don’t do anything half-heartedly.”
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Based on Microsoft’s consumer products, financial industry users can expect notable advances and improvement, observes McPartland. “Windows 7 is so much more stable and advanced than XP,” he says. “It’s a similar transformation. That’s where they are going. They have complex event processing (CEP); they had HPC server software and because they have such reach and such a deep set of products, it’s definitely an interesting area to keep an eye on.”
The enhanced functionality available when using all Microsoft products is a key to its cloud offering. “What they get the most flack for is that it works best when you are running with .Net or Microsoft tools,” says McPartland. “But if you are already a Microsoft-focused company then the efficiency … is apparent pretty quickly because it’s all so integrated.”
Read the full article at waterstechnology.com
This story talks about Citi’s foray into visualization to help with risk management. My comments:
“Before all of the mess started, we were in a place where companies with household names were perceived as having zero risk,” says Kevin McPartland, senior analyst with Tabb Group. “There was no chance that a major bank would ever disappear, so the thought of a bank disappearing didn’t go into their calculations of risk. But the crisis did bring a good thing to the market-it made people more aware and more conscious of the risks they take and how they manage those risks.”
Full Article at WatersOnline.com
Real-time risk isn’t really real-time – on demand is probably more accurate. Regardless, the credit crisis has put a big focus on risk management and culture and process, not technology, is the real speed bump in the way of progress. My comments:
“Counterparty risk is not a technology problem any more,” says McPartland. “The technology is more than sophisticated enough to do those calculations quickly, to gather data. It is more of a process issue. We are still in a world where a lot of financial firms are working in product silos with legacy technology. If all of those things could be erased-and that is no easy task-and a firm could start from scratch, there is no question that technology is out there and most of it can be bought off the shelf.”
Full article here (scroll down the page)
It used to be the market-makers and specialists who took the brunt of broker complaints that prices were fixed and the market was inefficient. Now, most of them are gone, so high-frequency trading firms are in the spotlight. Making markets is about gathering information quickly and making decisions based on that information faster than the competition. For high-frequency traders, that means seeking out millisecond inefficiencies and trading on them in microseconds.
