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.

Keynote Panel: A-Team’s Fragmentation World Tour - Grand Ballroom

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)
- Mike Bignell, President and CCO, Omega ATS
- Stewart Orrell, Senior Manager, Financial Services, Equinix
- Darren Toulson, Head of Research, LiquidMetrix

Insight Sessions - Grand Ballroom

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
- Jason England, Associate Partner – eTrading / Market Data, Citihub
- Jay Houghton, Director of Algo Services Engineering, Lime Brokerage
- Daniel May, Director and Co-Founder, SpryWare

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)
- Greg Malatestinic, Co-Chair FIX Protocol Algorithmic Trading Working Group, Senior Technology Analyst, Jordan and Jordan, FIX Protocol Organization
- John Morar, Research Scientist, InfoSphere Streams Applications, IBM Research
- Scott Parsons, Chief Scientist and Architect, Exegy
- 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)
- Stephane Dubois, Chairman, CEO and Founder, Xignite
- Mike Dunne, CTO, ACTIV Financial Systems
- Scott Kennedy, Global Business Manager, Direct Feeds, Thomson Reuters
- Tom Saleh, Founder & CEO, FlexiSphere

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 & Editor-in-Chief, A-Team Group (Moderator)
- Sinan Baskan, Senior Director, Worldwide Solutions, Financial Solutions Group, Sybase
- Roger Burkhardt, CEO, Ingres
- Gary LaFever, Chief Corporate Development Officer, FTEN
- Nancy Andrews Turbé, Capital Markets Industry NA Lead - Risk Practice, Accenture
- Allen Whipple, Principal, QuartetFS

Cloud Computing for the Financial Markets - Changing the Game

Cloud computing is being hailed as an answer to reducing spend on operating infrastructure IT - which accounts for about 75% of IT budgets. Wall Street firms looking to free up those budgets to support business growth are kicking the tires of cloud offerings, wary of issues such as performance and security, and whether the ROI is really there. This session will review:

* Cloud alternatives: private, public, hybrid, and infrastructure/platform services.
* Approaches to moving legacy systems to cloud environments: is it worth it?
* Building and deploying new applications in the cloud: what makes sense?
* The emergence of industry groups and standards as accelerators of cloud adoption.
* Can clouds really change the IT spend game?

- Peter Harris, President & Editor-at-Large, A-Team Group (Moderator)
- William F. Adiletta, President, TekFinancial Solutions
- Paul Jameson, Global Senior Director, Financial Services, Cisco Systems
- Dave Malik, Director, Solutions Architecture – Advanced Services, Cisco Systems
- Phil Morris, CTO, Platform Computing
- Ryan Waite, General Manager, Technical Computing, Microsoft

Free Drill-Down Sessions - Plaza Suite

Pushing Through the Inflection Point with Microsoft Technical Computing

Modeling and simulation as well as raw computational performance is critical in an industry with an insatiable and ever growing need for data. The pace and complexity of contemporary financial markets require its professionals to model an ever increasing scale of scenarios and trading conditions in the quickest manner possible. However, the path from math to model to results often takes too long.  Ryan Waite will discuss solutions to this challenge across client, cluster and cloud.

- Ryan Waite, Principal Product Unit Manager, Microsoft

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. Likewise firms are keen to see greater standardization of data and are looking to the service providers to offer Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) to complement new developments in PaaS arena.

This panel will discuss the latest developments in cloud computing and their significance driving cloud adoption in Financial Services and ensuring that this becomes mainstream.

- Alex Heneveld, Founder and CTO, Cloudsoft (Moderator)
- Tom Saleh, Founder & CEO, FlexiSphere
- Bruce Tolley, Vice President, Solutions Marketing, Solarflare Communications

Low Latency Exchange to Exchange Connectivity

New technologies are rapidly lowering the transport times between exchange locations. As firms expand their HFT and Algo markets to include equities, options and FX they are gaining significant competitive advantages by lowering latency and reducing complexity in their physical connections between buildings. This session will explore the most common connectivity options in use today by  firms looking to lower latency in their exchange to exchange connectivity. The session will discuss the underlying technology for each solution and will finally put a representative for each solution into the same room. Speakers will include a Managed Service Provider, Fractional Fiber Provider and a dark fiber provider, as well as, an optical transport equipment provider.

- Brian Quigley, Director of Sales North America, ADVA Optical Networking (Moderator)
- W. Brennan Carley, Senior Vice President, Spread Networks
- Mike Persico, Managing Director, Anova Technologies
- David Pho, Director of Engineering, Lightower Fiber Networks
- James Theodoras, VP Technology, ADVA Optical Networking

How IT is Fueling FX Markets Innovation

Low-latency systems, high-frequency trading, complex event processing, co-location, and more.  These technologies - proven in the equities markets - are now being deployed to underpin the increasingly fragmented and automated foreign exchange markets. This session will explore the impact of IT on this huge global marketplace.

- Andrew Haines, CIO, Gain Capital (Moderator)
- Darren Jer, Founder and COO, MarketFactory
- Al Moore, Director of Business Development, Fixnetix
- Harrell Smith, Head of Product Strategy, Portware
- Richard Tibbetts, CTO, StreamBase Systems

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
- Todd Montgomery, VP of Architecture, Messaging Business Unit, 29West-Informatica
- Henry Young, Founder and Director, TS-Associates

Free Drill-Down Sessions - Promenade Suite

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

Market Data Processing and Distribution "Fabric" with Sub Microsecond Latency

Rapid advances in the field of programmable hardware have created the potential to cut thru performance bottlenecks and shave latency to the minimum. NovaSparks delivers on this potential thru a combination of state of the art hardware design joined with sophisticated domain specific compilation technology that delivers sub microsecond latency solutions for market data processing and distribution.

- Ben Hyde, Vice President, Software Development, NovaSparks

Getting a Grip on Latency Management

In today’s hyper-competitive markets, market participants have little tolerance for poor network and application performance. Given these service-quality demands, a unified latency management approach is a critical component of a high-performance trading infrastructure. Unlike approaches that tackle silos individually, such as monitoring, visibility, historical reporting, a comprehensive latency management strategy incorporates and unifies these silos to provide true control over the timely delivery of transactions over trading infrastructure.

During this session, NetScout and Saro Jahani, CIO of the National Stock Exchange, will explore the need for unified latency management solutions that protect end-user service experience. The speakers will share successful approaches and strategies to architecting trading infrastructures that simplify comprehensive latency management and optimize the delivery of timely trade order executions or transactions. The audience will have the opportunity to have an interactive discussion with the CIO of an exchange market leader on real-world examples of unified latency management and how this bolsters the high-performance NSX trading infrastructure as a strategic business enabler.

- Ken Czekaj, Financial Principal Sales Engineer, NetScout
- Saro Jahani, Chief Information Officer, NSX

Wide Area InfiniBand … Connect without Compromise!

Leaders in the financial services industry have embraced InfiniBand in their HPC back rooms, but did you know that the same high performance capability is now available over the wide area network?

Join a panel of leading-edge networking experts who will share their real world experiences in using InfiniBand as a transport protocol to move data across campus, metro and global distances to achieve the highest throughput, lowest latency, least jitter and all, securely encrypted at full 10Gb/s line rate.

For a live webcast of this session (and up to 90 days follow) please click here.

- Dr. David Southwell, CTO, Obsidian Strategics (Moderator)
- Richard Croucher, Founder and Chief Architect, Informatix Solutions
- Linden Mercer, Senior Research Engineer, U.S. Navy Applied Research Laboratory/Penn State University
- Alan K. Powers, Lead HPC Architect, Computer Sciences Corp.
- Tracy Wilson, Program Manager, Avetec

On Demand Big Dataset Analysis for Risk Analytics and Compliance

The capital markets industry is being besieged with requests by trading management, regulators, customers and shareholders for increased information and analysis - on demand - covering vital risk management and compliance functions. Addressing these vital requirements with increasingly limited resources is a serious challenge to 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.

- Roger Burkhardt, CEO, Ingres
- Stephen Ferrando, Partner, Bendigo Partners/CEO, dbConcert