Microsoft Pivots to Deliver More Data, Faster
February 22, 2010
Joe Pagano insists that he is looking forward to work in the months ahead as "Microsoft has never released more value in its platforms for financial service firms than it has with the current wave."
That value comes from products that appeared late last year and others-such as Microsoft Office 2010-to be released in the first half of 2010.
These include PowerPivot for Excel 2010 - a feature of the new Microsoft Office-and .NET Framework 4.0, used in concert with Visual Studio 2010.
The first release "is a big deal," Pagano says, because PowerPivot will enable analysis of massive data sets from virtually any data format down to the desktop, allowing financial firms to make better decisions far faster and at lower cost. The latter product-a .NET extension-facilitates the extremely complex task of programming multiple threads of instructions that run simultaneously on multiple core processors in racks of trading servers. These multi-thread, multi-core workloads more readily achieve the low latencies and high trading volumes that financial firms seek.
In December, Pagano himself became Microsoft's new managing director of Banking and Capital Markets in its Worldwide Financial Services Industry Group, after 15 years with the firm.
While based in New York and experienced in serving clients such as Barclays Bank, Citicorp, Credit Suisse and JP Morgan Chase, Pagano says he makes frequent trips to company headquarters in Redmond, Washington and locations around the globe, to meet with and counsel representatives of his international client base.
Pagano said he has done everything from sales to product development and architecture design in his tenure at Microsoft. This has included the development of Microsoft Exchange's disaster recovery program and management of corporate initiatives such as the Intel-Microsoft Alliance, to ensure the compatibility of Intel's processor products with Microsoft's servers.
Recently, Pagano spoke with Contributing Editor Katherine Heires about the state of technology for capital markets, new product launches for 2010-including in risk management, compliance, advanced analytics and additional finance-friendly features for its Excel spreadsheet program-and recent market challenges faced by Microsoft.
>How would you characterize the current state of technology for the capital markets industry? What's the current focus of customers?
We see customers starting to turn the corner on cost-cutting and invest more on innovation, especially where they can gain deeper insight on their customers and overall business. While there are a few more points to be made on cost-cutting efforts focused around virtualization and enterprise architecture efforts that can increase overall operational efficiency, we are seeing more interest in solutions that foster innovation around products and services, especially those that help improve customer experience and attract new retail customers. We are seeing very strong interest in next-generation collaboration and enterprise social networking capabilities, such as those that we are providing with Sharepoint 2010 because this improves productivity as well as the ability to generate new ideas for products and services.
Where are there opportunities for Microsoft to sell new products to the financial services sector?
On the risk and compliance side, we see an increasing need to provide simplification and automation, especially in capital markets; It's not just about managing Value at Risk and asset positions. There is an idea that operational risk is just as important.
