Conference Program

The conference program includes a main Insight track, with sessions that include A-Team content delivered by our analysts, plus an industry panel session combined with interactive audience Q&A.

Alongside, Drill-Down sessions give sponsors the opportunity to cover specific business trends, market applications and technologies in greater detail.

Click on session titles for more information.

Note: Technology Showcase Exhibits close at 4pm.

Opening Keynote Address Presented by Sybase – Porter Tun Room

Intra-Day Risk Analysis (On Current Data!) Without Starting From Scratch

As organisations strive to achieve intra-day analysis either as a result of business focus or regulatory pressure the expectation is that both cost and operational complexity will increase dramatically.  This is largely due to the inability of traditional technologies to make the leap from batch oriented activities to real-time data capture, monitoring and analysis.  This presentation will review how requirements for intra-day analysis from single business to global Group level can be achieved quickly and show how the right technology approach can achieve big advancements in weeks whilst avoiding pitfalls and reducing cost.

- Adrian Williams, Business Development Director, Sybase UK
- Peter Simpson, SVP, Research and Development, Panopticon

Pre-Luncheon Address: Bringing Niche to the Mainstream - Oracle in Capital Markets - Porter Tun Room

Oracle will highlight the "Next Generation" hardware and software that is helping financial services organisations effectively grow their business and optimise performance from the front to the back-office.

- Darshan Chandarana, Director, Financial Services Middleware, EMEA, Oracle

Insight Sessions – Porter Tun Room

Beyond Equities and Sub-Microsecond - Future Architectures for Low Latency Trading

As firms look to HFT and Algo markets beyond equities - options and FX - lowering latency across all components of the universal trading architecture is the goal. This session will focus on:

* How to leverage low-latency systems across different markets to create a unified architecture for high performance multi-asset class trading.
* Current efforts to reduce latency, including co-location, fibre-optic connectivity and shared memory/massive multi-core servers.
* Emerging latency focuses: Application and component design and in-memory data management.

- Peter Harris, President & Editor-at-Large, A-Team Group (Moderator)
- Peter Duffy, CTO, Sumerian
- Ben Newton, Associate Partner, Citihub
- Mark Palmer, CEO, StreamBase Systems
- Asaf Somekh, Vice President of Marketing, Voltaire

Algo Trading - Next Generation Technologies for New Markets

Algorithmic trading - in all its forms - is moving mainstream, and is being more widely adopted as sell-side firms open up their once highly secret sauce to their buy-side customers, as trading system and tools vendors package requisite functionality, and as industry-wide standards emerge to ease implementation.  This session will consider:

* The buy versus build decision. How and when to leverage OMS and EMS packages, and connectivity, and approaches to proprietary customisation.
* Where latency is a factor, and how to minimise it.
* Components of an algo trading toolkit: complex event and stream processing, in-memory databases, HPC multi-core/accelerated hardware platforms.
* The role and benefits of FIXatdl and future directions.

- Andrew Delaney, President & Editor-in-Chief, A-Team Group (Moderator)
- Stuart Adams, EMEA Regional Director, FIX Protocol Organization
- Valerie Bannert-Thurner PhD, Executive Director, FTEN Europe
- Bradley Duke, Managing Director and Head of Knight Direct in Europe
- Mark Powers, Head of Sales and Marketing, Lime Brokerage

A New Era for Enterprise Data Delivery

The delivery of market data is transforming from traditional datafeeds, ticker plants and firm-based integration, to new architectures that reduce the cost and complexity of leveraging enterprise data. This session will explore:

* Making market data discovery and integration a frictionless activity, so trading firms can focus on their core business.
* Designing distributed and edge-of-network architectures for the lowest latency in a fragmented trading marketplace.
* Deploying cloud and managed services to allow easy leverage of enterprise market and reference data services.

- Peter Harris, President & Editor-at-Large, A-Team Group (Moderator)
- John Best, Principal Consultant, Kendale Systems and Services
- Combie Cryan, Head of Business Development – Global Data Products, NYSE Technologies
- Bill Fenick, European Business Manager for Real Time Information, Thomson Reuters
- David Hann, Managing Director, EMEA, for ACTIV Financial Systems

Creating an IT Blueprint for On-Demand Holistic Risk Management

Driven by regulatory reporting pressures, as well as greater C-Level oversight and shareholder activism, risk monitoring and management is moving from narrowly-defined end-of-day back-office functions to an enterprise-wide holistic view across asset classes in the front and middle offices. “On Demand” access to risk profiles on a “Slice and Dice” basis is the imperative as firms look to take a proactive approach to understanding their risk landscapes. This session will discuss:

* What a holistic view of risk comprises, and how it can be achieved.
* Approaches to systems and data integration, across business unit silos.
* Turning data into meaningful, actionable risk information.
* How to build an IT risk architecture that is scalable and extensible.

- Andrew Delaney, President and Editor-in-Chief, A-Team Group (Moderator)
- Xavier Bellouard, Managing Director, QuartetFS
- John Collins, Member, Kinetic Partners LLP
- Amir Halfon, Senior Director, Technology, Oracle Financial Services
- Simon Tweddle, Risk Management COO, Mizuho International

A-Team’s Fragmentation World Tour

A-Team’s Editor-in-Chief Andrew Delaney discusses the impact of alternative trading systems on the global execution landscape, and offers an insight into the world’s liquidity fragmentation hotspots, including the Nordics, Toronto, pan-European equities, Tokyo and Australia.

- Andrew Delaney, President and Editor-in-Chief, A-Team Group (Moderator)
- Steve Grob, Director of Group Strategy, Fidessa
- Rustam Lam, Director, Global Head of Marketing, RealTick
- Tony Moulange, Senior Business Development Manager, Colt Technology Services
- Peter Randall, CEO, Equiduct

Free Drill-Down Sessions – Upper Sugar Room

Building High Performance Cloud Applications for the Front Office

Cloudsoft will provide a sneak preview of their Monterey Spring Edition, a powerful middleware platform enabling high performance, adaptive cloud applications targeted at the Spring developer and which will be officially launched at SpringOne in October.

As well as providing an overview of Monterey’s core capabilities, this session will highlight its integration with the SpringSource Tool Suite™(STS) to provide a comprehensive Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering which simplifies building, running and managing elastic trading applications that can span the globe.

The reality is that firms won’t be able to make the most of the cloud unless they embrace the PaaS approach as this radically simplifies the creation of applications that know how to take advantage of the cloud computing model.  This explains VMware’s investment in SpringSource; its subsequent acquisition of companies like Gemstone and RabbitMQ and its partnerships with Salesforce and Google.  It is also the driving force behind Microsoft’s Azure strategy.

Join Alex Heneveld (Cloudsoft), Steve Hughes (Colt) and Alexis Richardson (VMware/RabbitMQ) as they discuss the latest developments in the PaaS arena and their significance driving cloud adoption in Financial Services and ensuring that this becomes mainstream.

- Alex Heneveld, Founder and CTO, Cloudsoft (Moderator)
- Alexis Richardson, Senior Director, VMware/SpringSource
- Steve Hughes, Cloud Services Specialist, Colt

Building Intelligent and Fast Edge Networks, Closer to Your Trading Applications

Intelligent edge Networks are better adapting to your low-latency trading applications by greatly reducing end-to-end latency, by guaranteeing fairness of traffic flow and by providing deterministic values. Intelligent edge Networks are specifically focused at interconnecting datacenter servers and providing the fastest and most reliable connectivity between servers, applications and storage.  Technology like 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet is enabling trading applications to significantly reduce their computing time, increasing your business responsiveness.

- Charles Ferland, Vice President & General Manager, Europe, Middle-East & Africa, BLADE Network Technologies

On Demand Transparency for Big Data in Capital Markets

The Capital Markets industry is being besieged with requests by regulators, shareholders and investors for increased transparency. Addressing this issue with both tightened budgets and reduced headcount is proving to be a serious challenge for many firms.

This interactive session will demonstrate breakthrough technology required to deliver on demand analysis on the large volumes of data required to meet these requests.

Specific case studies will include on-demand risk management, position and P&L analysis and model development/back testing.

- Stephen Ferrando, Partner, Bendigo Partners/CEO, dbConcert
- Steve Shine, EVP, Worldwide Operations, Ingres

The FIX Protocol: A Blueprint for Innovation in the Financial Markets

As the European financial markets continue to fragment, developing a competitive offering and being at the forefront of innovation is integral to your firm’s success. Evaluating the potential that standardisation offers to market participants, this session will explore the many advantages that using FIX, which is deeply embedded into the bedrock of the financial services industry, presents.  It will look at the new business issues that using FIX addresses, the economic rationale for choosing standards, the efficiency gains achievable, how FPL works with other standards bodies to set in place guidelines to advise on which standards should be used in the trade life-cycle to reduce spend, in addition to, how choosing standards can enable firms to reduce barriers to entry into new markets and encourage the development of more innovative solutions. Join this session to gain a detailed understanding of how increased use of standards including the FIX Protocol could prove beneficial for your firm.

- Stuart Adams, EMEA Regional Director, FIX Protocol Organization

Latency Reduction – The Latest Techniques, and Where We’re Heading

The current level of interest in latency reduction is manifesting in three principal ways. Firstly, the messaging vendors are embracing latency reduction techniques such as kernel bypass and hardware acceleration. Secondly, the requirement for latency reduction implies the requirement for latency monitoring and benchmarking. Thirdly, the latency spotlight is also falling on the fundamental principles of network architecture and switch design. With leading industry experts in each of these areas, we will endeavour to understand the interplay of each of these factors, and gain some insights into the direction that our industry is heading in.

- Dave Clare, Regional Vice President, EMEA, Solace Systems
- Charles Ferland, Vice President & General Manager, Europe, Middle-East & Africa, BLADE Network Technologies
- Todd Montgomery, VP, Architecture, Messaging Business Unit, 29West-Informatica
- Asaf Somekh, Vice President of Marketing, Voltaire
- Henry Young, Founder and Director, TS-Associates

Free Drill-Down Sessions – Lower Sugar Room

Clock Synchronization: The Jitters and Everything You Were Afraid To Ask About Precision Time

There are many approaches to, and techniques for, managing the performance of high-end applications, but the foundation they all must be built on is precise instrumentation. In the realm of low-latency applications, such as high-performance trading, the foundation is precision timing: without knowing exactly when specific events occur, you can’t begin to measure, analyse and manage latency. The timestamping mechanism used determines how precisely events can be timed - however it turns out to be as important, if not more important, to understand the quality of the clock being used.

- Raymond Russell, CTO and Co-Founder, Corvil

Comparing Low Latency Ethernet versus InfiniBand – Is There a Winner?

Over the recent years, InfiniBand has been the low latency, high bandwidth network of choice. However, low latency Ethernet is coming with momentum.

With protocol enhancements via FCoE, CEE, the standard Ethernet network will experience features previously only found in system area networks. Program models and kernel bypass techniques have started to be applied as well. Eventually, the only difference between these two architectures will be speed!

In this talk, we will discuss the two different networks and their benefits from an architectural and application point of view. Performance results and comparisons will conclude the presentation.

- Markus Fischer, HPC Consultant, Stordis