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