SIA Technology Management Conference
Sell Side Pours Dollars Into Capacity, Connectivity | Market Data Needed--And Faster, Please | Hedge Fund Asset-Class Demands Raise Stakes for Servicers | SIA, BMA Quiet About Merger; Some Open Questions Remain | Matching People and Technology | Elsewhere in Town: Thain, Nazareth at the Big Board's Regulatory Show | Business Is Looking Up, Vendors Act Accordingly | Sybase: Can Breadth Trump Specialization? | Platform's Latest Version Goes Real-Time | Intel: Wanting to Be Noticed--Up to a Point | Smart Searches Find Their Way to Wall Street | Asset Manager Ixis Using Pyxis' mWholesaler | Vendors Combine Real-Time and Historical Analytics | Bracing for MiFID
Intel: Wanting to Be Noticed--Up to a Point
June 19, 2006
At least three news developments mentioned elsewhere in this issue of Securities Industry News had an element of Intel inside--to borrow one of the semiconductor giant's branding slogans. The Santa Clara, Calif. company signed on as a founder-member of JWG-IT, a think tank assisting financial institutions in Europe with technological solutions for the pending Markets in Financial Instruments Directive; was a partner with Reuters Group in delivering the Reuters Tick Capture Engine to European executing brokerage CA Cheuvreux; and shared the spotlight in the release of infrastructure software company GemStone Systems' GemFire on Intel for Financial Services platform for low-latency, intelligent data routing in large-scale computing grids and clusters.
Along with the announcement last week by
GemStone, Intel Corp. director of financial services Eric Doyle
said, "Intel is committed to introducing and driving innovative,
advanced technology to the market, enabling organizations to
efficiently analyze huge volumes of data in shorter periods of
time. Our enhanced software offerings such as 64-bit computing and
I/O Acceleration Technology augment the sophisticated data
infrastructure solution in GemFire."
Elaborating in a telephone interview from his Portland, Ore. office, Doyle called the GemStone relationship "a great example of work we do throughout the industry. ... We try to get a good understanding, working with end users, of where the technology needs to go. Then we go determine who are the best fellow travelers to work with and help enable them, as with GemStone's GemFire product, to run really well on top of systems from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell or anyone else that is based on Intel silicon."
It is, in other words, a partnership strategy often aimed at assisting and promoting independent software vendors (ISVs) to adopt Intel-based hardware. At the Securities Industry Association technology conference this week, Intel and its partnerships will be lower-profile than are the "ecosystems" of companies like Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems, but by design, as Doyle discussed with SIN editor in chief Jeffrey Kutler.
What will we see of Intel at the SIA show? We typically keep our demonstration booth fairly small, where we'll highlight a couple of key ISVs utilizing our latest and greatest product in a grid environment. You'll see how the work we did with the ISVs was able to drive a greater number of trades in a shorter period of time. One reason our presence isn't bigger than it is is that we work closely with hardware and software vendors to show their products. If you look at the Microsoft booth you'll see a lot of their fellow travelers; we take the same approach. We will also spend a lot of time talking to end users and fellow travelers we are not yet engaged with. We still get a lot of questions from people who don't get the connection between Intel and financial services. We use the SIA show as an opportunity to get the message out about what we do and how we help enable and drive markets.
How exactly do you do that? Here is an example. When we started approaching the financial services community, it was because we had--and still have--a close relationship with Microsoft. But because of Wall Street's attitude toward that [company's] operating system, we realized that we needed to work with a Linux provider. So we established a relationship with Red Hat Software. Working with Red Hat, with compiler threading optimization tools, with Rogue Wave Software and others, we were able to drive an Intel-based solution with the Linux operating system in the financial services market. Once that was established, we could go to the ISVs and say that we have a solid platform to which they could write. What you've seen is adoption of Intel-based x86 solutions in Wall Street. We continue to build on that with things like grid computing. Customers are finding that once they get to a deployment of about 200 nodes, the memory latency--the traffic within the system--becomes a bottleneck. GemFire, on top of servers based on Intel architecture, is one system that tries to eliminate those bottlenecks. Now end users on Wall Street are talking about 100,000-node clusters. We have a long way to go to get there, and we want to work with the right technology providers to make those solutions a reality.
