News Report # 3

With the markets collapsing in the U.S., you would think that the progress of cutting edge technology would slow down. The main players in financial services have been a major driver of technological innovation. Capital markets which include investment banks, hedge funds and electronic markets require the most innovation in the financial market segment. Banks and insurance companies are big IT buyers who are a step behind the curve.
Trades are going through so fast they are measured in milliseconds. The trades around the globe are mostly computer and algorithm driven. The real problem is reducing latency. Latency is the time required to locate the first bit or character in a storage location, expressed as access time minus word time. “If an application needs to send data to a second app in a separate container, the data goes all the way back to the networking card and travels through multiple layers of the software stack. The result: latency.”
Suns TCP Fusion short circuits processes and moves data directly from one container to the other reducing latency. Continuous linked settlement helps foreign exchange by bringing together major banks giving them a real time view of risk. meetings are being held to build a similar plan that would help with the derivatives. Targeted financial investment in advanced infrastructure is going to be the way to succeed in today’s environment. Companies will be investing in advanced cloud computing as needed. This does not mean IT spending will increase as a whole but the companies that did well this year are planning on spending more on IT next year. There will be chaos in the IT markets due to the events of the past couple weeks, referring to the bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and the action between Bank of America and Merill Lynch. I believe the IT market is in a lot of trouble right now, but the innovation will continue bringing the market back up

Snyder, Bill. http://weblog.infoworld.com/tech-bottom-line/archives/2008/09/its_sky_isnt_fa.html Sept 25, 2008

News Report #2

This week the Lehman Brothers went  bankrupt and Merril Lynch got taken over, giving the information and technology providers a devastating blow.  “Research firm Financial Insights, owned by IDC, said information technology budgets for hardware, software and tech services shrank by 6 percent due to Lehman's collapse and Merrill's sale to Bank of America.”  Cisco systems, IBM, Microsoft, and EMC are all going to lose business.

Technology companies are really hurting from the financial sector meltdown, but there are benefits to be reaped from work on integrating computer systems.  The financial section will continue to spend, not on new equipment but will be investing in new projects to be more efficient and software to improve decision making.  Virtualization software is hot in the market right now.   Virtualization allows a computer to behave like multiple machines helping companies save money and get the most out of the equipment. VMWare Inc and Microsoft are going to benefit from the virtualization software that was built into its new computer software.  "(Wall Street firms) still need to invest in the competitive tools to remain productive," said Sean O'Dowd, a senior analyst at Financial Insights.

Business intelligence, which helps business executives make decisions is a good investment.  Tech companies are really hurting right now.  Analysts are forecasting bad outlooks from tech companies such as Dell and computer products maker Ingram Micro Inc.

The chance  to sell to the top 10 firms in the U.S. security industry has decreased by one third.  News and financial data providers are also going to be impacted negatively.

Wed Sept 17,2008, Wall Street Turmoil ripples throgh tech and data vendors. google news.com