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.

Insight Sessions – Grand Ballroom

Keynote: Driving Innovation - Leadership in Financial Markets Architecture

Liquidnet has been voted the leader in operational excellence for the second consecutive year by Z/Yen’s 2009 survey of Operational Performance of Brokers. Their surveyed roster of clients, which include traders, portfolio managers, analysts and corporate issuers all recognize the value of having the most powerful and innovative tools at their disposal, and count on Liquidnet’s ground-breaking technology to access the global equities marketplace. Join Liquidnet’s Head of Architecture Brett Kotch as he outlines strategies and technologies he’s used in building Liquidnet’s award-winning network.

The keynote will specifically address:
- Technology adoption s-curves
- Specific messaging use cases and solutions
- Physics defines the shortest path, however, it might not be the fastest path
- Multicast vs. simplicity and agility, and why you no longer need to make the choice
- Why hardware-based messaging is the next major innovation in messaging
- Real messaging platform latency numbers

* Craig Betts, President and CEO, Solace Systems
* Brett Kotch, Head of Architecture, Liquidnet

Insight sessions cover industry issues that A-Team focuses on continuously through its news analysis and research:

Low-Latency Architectures for DMA and High Frequency Trading

While the "low latency arms race" in general continues to drive investments in this cutting edge trading segment, in 2010 there will be new challenges to address, including the shift towards enhanced direct market access, new focuses on controls for sponsored access, on providing pre-trade risk/compliance and supporting new, more complex, asset classes.

How will trading firms address these challenges within their business models and IT architectures? And what will they be seeking from vendors that have traditionally focused just on speed of data communications and not on providing intelligence to boost profitability and manage risk?

* Andrew Delaney, President and Editor-in-Chief, A-Team Group (Moderator)
* Dan Bergman, VP, High Performance Engineering, Lime Brokerage
* Jeff Ferry, Director of Broadband Marketing, Infinera
* Nicolas De Vanssay, Operations Director, Colt Internet US Corp.
* Dave Malik, Director, Solutions Architecture, Cisco Systems
* Dan Romanelli, Managing Director, Managed Transactions, NYSE Technologies

Scaling Up and Out for the Real-Time and Low-Latency Market Data Explosion

Market data rates and volumes continue to grow, driven by market fragmentation, high frequency and algorithmic trading, and regulations aimed at market efficiency. At the same time, minimizing latency of data delivery has become key for many trading firms. Addressing these, sometimes competing, challenges of throughput and latency likely requires a mix of approaches and deployment of different IT designs and technologies.

What are the trade-offs between consolidated and direct data feeds, and when is each more appropriate? What is the best way to manage direct feeds - through an in-house ticker plant, or an outsourced co-located platform. And how can the market data feeds be leveraged across an enterprise, driving electronic and human trading, middle and back office functions?

* Peter Harris, President, Americas and Editor-at-Large, A-Team Group (Moderator)
* Falke Bruinsma, Chief Architect, Websphere Front Office and Low Latency Messaging, IBM
* Scott Caudell, Senior VP, Global Architecture, Interactive Data 7ticks
* Shawn Kaplan, Director of Business Development, ACTIV Financial Systems
* Pramod Srivatsa, Manager, Server Access Virtualization, Cisco Systems
* Jeff Wells, Co-Chair, FIF Market Data Capacity Working Group

The Financial Markets Data Centre - Strategic Asset or Cost of Doing Business?

Major Wall Street firms are saying they don’t want to be in the business of running data centres … on the other hand, the likes of NYSE Euronext are proclaiming data centres as the new exchange floors that are transforming their business models.

How important is it for financial institutions to own their IT infrastructure, and what advantages does this afford? Does cloud computing or even managed hosting adequately address the challenges of scalability and ROI? Indeed, can cloud computing ever deliver the kind of performance demanded of financial applications?

For managed service and co-location/proximity providers, what are the hot applications, services and business models, and what service level agreements are being demanded by customers. How can one differentiate an offering to provide a USP?

* Peter Harris, President, Americas and Editor-at-Large, A-Team Group (Moderator)
* Duncan Johnston-Watt, Founder and CEO, Cloudsoft
* Russ Kohn, Managing Director - Global Connectivity, NYSE Technologies
* Neil Palmer, Partner, SunGard Consulting Services
* Patrick Ruppe, Head of Marketing, Options IT

Powering Pre-Trade Analytics and Modeling

As electronic trading focuses on new asset classes, such as options and fixed income, so new complexities emerge in terms of pre-trade pricing and the calculation of analytics at the front-end of the trade life cycle. The onus is on delivering the compute power required to make highly complex calculations in orders-of-magnitude reduced times.

What are the markets where speed of analytics is required most? And how complex will calculations get? What technology solutions have merit - HPC, grid computing, hardware acceleration, cloud computing - and what are the best choices for individual analytics requirements?

* Peter Harris, President, Americas and Editor-at-Large, A-Team Group (Moderator)
* Nancy Turbé, Executive, Core Trading & Settlement Services, Accenture
* Jason Gross, Co-Founder, RNA Networks
* Gerald A. Hanweck, Jr., PhD, Founder and CEO, Hanweck Associates
* Satyam Kancharla, Senior VP, Client Solutions Group, Numerix
* Jason Stowe, Founder and CEO, Cycle Computing

Building a Winning Trading Architecture for a Fragmented World

Liquidity fragmentation is accelerating, and spreading beyond the U.S. equities markets to other asset classes and new geographies. New regulations encouraging competition are creating new opportunities for trading firms, transforming the business models of traditional exchanges, and creating new businesses for connectivity, co-location and extranet specialists.

How will trading firms design their execution systems to achieve an optimal latency profile across multiple venues? What role do connectivity and co-lo services play, and will moves like those of NYSE-Euronext be copied by other execution venues? Who will be the technology vendors with the most appropriate solutions and services?

* Andrew Delaney, President and Editor-in-Chief, A-Team Group (Moderator)
* Lloyd Altman, Senior Director, Core Trading & Settlement Services, Accenture
* Chris Janz, Senior Director of Portfolio Management, Ciena
* Ray La Chance, CEO, Lexent Metro Connect
* Tom Watson, Product Management, ORC Software

Drill-Down Sessions – Plaza Suite

Next Generation Trading Systems - High Performance and Low Latency

Leading firms have moved from legacy designs to streamline the execution path for lowest latency. Where will the next wave of performance come from and how will it impact bank and exchange trading system architectures? This session will explore real world patterns of next generation architectures including trends with 10Gig and Infiniband networks and how best to leverage the advances in multi core architectures to achieve the lowest latency.

* Jitesh Ghai, Global Director, Systems Engineering, 29West-Informatica (Moderator)
* Amir Halfon, Sr Director, Technology, Capital Markets, Oracle
* Saro Jahani, Chief Information Officer, NSX
* Naoki Nakashima, Chief Representative, Senior Researcher, Daiwa Institute of Research
* Alessandro Petroni, Director, Platform Services, Deutsche Bank

Accelerating Optical Networks for Low Latency Applications - A Real-World Case Study

It is well known that the latency and performance of a financial firm’s metropolitan and wide area network has direct correlation to profits. Significant investments are made to save microseconds and even nanoseconds of latency to gain a competitive advantage. One of the key areas where latency improvements can be harvested is in the optical transport network interconnecting the data centers and exchanges. New solutions and technologies are readily available that can virtually bring the data center closer to the exchange, and accelerate your trading strategies.

In this drill-down session, presented jointly by Colt Technology Services Group and Infinera, the presenters will discuss the technologies and approaches to providing a low-latency Direct Market Access trading solution. This powerful combination of a leading transport service provider, Colt Technology Services Group, with an industry leading optical solutions provider, Infinera, provides a technology platform that brings your trading applications closer to the exchanges and market centers allowing you to receive your market data feeds and transmit orders routing execution instructions faster than the typical low latency platforms.

Infinera, the pioneer in photonic integration, will explain how new optical transport solutions and techniques can be leveraged for ultra low-latency networks. As the only vertically integrated optical system maker, Infinera can address the key issues and innovations in optical networking that enable a truly ultra low-latency solutions for service providers and enterprise customers alike. Colt Technology Services Group will describe how it has deployed Infinera for its pan-European next generation network allowing enabling the lowest latency networks for the financial trading community through its FastNet Ultra services. Colt Technology Services Group’s Fastnet Ultra services are delivered on high capacity links capable of supporting up to 1.6 Terabits per second at a significantly lower latency than competitors. Fastnet Ultra also takes advantage of Colt technology Services group’s best in class metropolitan networks in Europe and the close proximity of their data centre to financial exchanges to further increase the performance of trading systems. Furthermore, Colt Technology Services Group is actively reducing latency on critical trading routes between key financial centers, including routes to London, Chicago, Frankfurt, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam.

* Chris Liou, VP, Network Strategy, Infinera
* Nicolas De Vanssay, Operations Director, Colt Internet US Corp.

Meeting Your Ultra-Low Latency, High-Reliability … and Surveillance Needs

IBM will summarize its portfolio for exchanges and the front office of financial markets firms, describing how its offerings meet the intensely growing - and sometimes conflicting - requirements of functionality, ultra-low latency performance, highly reliable availability, and insight into internal operations for transparency, risk, and compliance.

IBM speakers will present on:

- WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets, its vendor-neutral market data distribution platform;
- WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging, with its published outstanding performance against industry-leading benchmarks;
- InfoSphere Streams, with its unparalleled throughput in parallel processing of financial data.

* Falke Bruinsma, Chief Architect, WebSphere Front Office and Low Latency Messaging, IBM (Moderator)
* Folu Okunseinde, Solutions Architect, WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging, IBM
* Edward Pring, Senior Programmer, IBM

Monitoring and Reporting for Ultra-Low Latency Services

With ever more emphasis placed on guaranteed latencies in the “handful of milliseconds” range, and trading latencies increasingly monitored to microsecond resolution, financial institutions are selecting interconnection carriers based on proven performance, backed by measureable Service Level Agreements.

This session will call on a panel of experts to explore the need for ultra-low latency (ULL), one-way delay measurement and real-time reporting, while addressing key challenges and measurement methods. From exploring the technology required to the market drivers, trading trends, and the networks that support them, the audience will interact with the panel to drill-down and discuss their own network issues, performance goals and customer requirements, making this a unique opportunity to meet with and share best-practices with your peers.

Guided discussion topics will include SLA Portals, per-second latency measurement and reporting, micro-bursting, short-term network performance fluctuations, and circuit-based analysis for both service providers and financial firms seeking the fastest possible networks.

* Gary Kim, Telecom Industry Analyst, Editor & Blogger (Moderator)
* Ernie Hoffmann, VP, Product Management, Optimum Lightpath
* John Knuff, General Manager, Financial Services, Equinix
* Jock Percy, CEO, Perseus Telecom
* Mary Stanhope, Sr. Director, Marketing, RCN Metro
* Scott Sumner, VP, Marketing, Accedian Networks

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.

* Nick Ciarleglio, Systems Engineer, Arista Networks
* Peter Lankford, Founder and Director, STAC
* Shawn McAllister, CTO, Solace Systems
* Bob Van Valzah, Director of Product Marketing, 29West-Informatica
* Henry Young, Founder and Director, TS-Associates

Drill-Down Sessions – Promenade Suite

Ensuring Real-World Performance – Low Latency when it Counts

The business impact of an ultra-low latency infrastructure for high frequency trading is well understood. However, the industry often characterizes performance of the infrastructure using artificial workloads that may not accurately represent real world requirements.

In this session, real world practitioners will discuss the myth and reality of instrumenting real world infrastructures. What are the pitfalls of benchmarking infrastructures in a piece-meal manner with artificial workloads? What are the advantages of end-to-end application level benchmarking with real-world workloads? How do customers get insightful performance information to properly architect and evaluate their infrastructures? Don’t miss this valuable session that will give you the insights and architectures you need to implement a high-performance infrastructure that works for you when it counts!

* Pramod Srivatsa, Manager, Server Access Virtualization, Cisco Systems (Moderator)
* Mats Andersson, CTO, NASDAQ
* Silvano Gai, Distinguished Fellow, Cisco Systems
* Aldrin Isaac, Head of Core Network Design, Bloomberg
* Peter Lankford, Founder and Director, STAC
* Shawn McAllister, CTO, Solace Systems

Changing the Trading Game Through Hardware Acceleration

Hardware acceleration - leveraging FPGAs, ASICs, GPUs and Cell - is now a reality for trading applications and infrastructure. This session explores different computation, data management and messaging applications and discusses how hardware acceleration is enabling these to scale to meet the extreme demands of today’s financial markets.

* Geno Valente, VP, Sales and Marketing, XtremeData (Moderator)
* Gerald A. Hanweck, Jr., PhD, Founder and CEO, Hanweck Associates
* Cliff Maddox, Technical Sales and ISV Relationships, ACTIV Financial Systems
* Mark Skalabrin, Founder and CEO, Redline Trading Solutions
* Barry Thompson, Founder and CTO, Tervela

Ultra-Low Latency Optical Transport

While financial firms are spending millions to shave latency from computing resources, the optical transport is often where you can achieve significant gains in performance. While the speed of light is a constant, there are indeed both strategies and technologies that can shave milliseconds off optical transport. At a time when nanoseconds can mean the difference between winning and losing a trade, it is imperative that financial firms understand these new techniques.

In this drill-down session, panelists will dig deeper into optical transport architectures, and how they may be built to win the latency war. The moderated panel will include representatives from an equipment vendor, dark fiber provider, and end customer, as well as a technologist to explain it all. For the first time ever in this typically secretive field, real world examples and data will be discussed, along with the enabling technology, in an open forum that is sure to be the hottest topic of discussion for months to come.

* Brian Quigley, Director of Financial Business Development, ADVA Optical Networking (Moderator)
* Ray La Chance, CEO, Lexent Metro Connect
* John Panzica, VP, Financial Services, Switch and Data
* Jim Theodoras, VP, Technology, ADVA Optical Networking

Low Latency Strategies in a Changing Regulatory Landscape

From National Market Systems (NMS) to the SEC’s regulation SHO on naked short selling, market regulation and structure has continually changed the opportunities available for trading strategies. The SEC’s market structure concept release and proposed rule filing on Risk Management Controls for Market Access are poised to impact the types of low latency strategies and trading behaviors in the near future.

Join our panel of industry practitioners for an interactive debate on the trends affecting trading strategies and future industry developments and learn how their experiences can help your firm embrace trading system changes.

* Dan Romanelli, Managing Director, Managed Transactions, NYSE Technologies (Moderator)
* John Cogman, Vice President, autobahn Equity, Deutsche Bank Securities
* Germán Creamer, Associate Professor of Quantitative Finance & Financial Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology
* Dhiru Patel, Managing Director, Chief Quantitative Strategist, Thomas Weisel Partners
* Vladimir Zilberman, Vice President, Bank of America Merrill Lynch