The timing could not be better for the relaunch of Intel’s financial services website - IntelfasterFS.com.

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It’s been a while I know, but this blogging business just keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the list. My thanks then to “Uncle” Tom Groenfeldt for alerting me on his blog to the recent departure from Sun Microsystems of Larry Scott, where he was vice president for financial services. Larry is going somewhere, though he’s not telling, at least not yet. But his departure jogged my memory to some offline conversations I’ve been having of late, not least during the Linux on Wall Street conference that I chaired the other week.

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Please excuse the headline … I wanted to be cute and grab some attention. When it comes to market data rates, OPRA - the Options Price Reporting Authority - makes the headlines that low latency vendors (and industry analysts) love to cite - because the numbers are so frighteningly big. The reality, though, is a bit different.
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There was quite a bit of M&A activity last week. Oracle and BEA for $8.5 billion (we’ll have to see whether that’s good news for BEA’s Weblogic Event Server), Sun Microsystems and MySQL for a billion, and NYSE-Euronext snapping up Wombat Financial Software for $200 million.
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You’d have thought that several months after we started this website that we’d know what we’re about. I guess we kinda thought the world out there had already decided what is low latency, and what is not. But I guess life isn’t that straightforward.

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Oracle caused a bit of excitement at the end of last week when it made an unsolicited bid for BEA Systems. BEA’s rejected it of course, saying it undervalues the company. All standard procedure. We’ll see what Oracle’s next move is. But if the transaction does happen, it will bring together some useful technologies that have merit in the world of low latency.
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Last month, Low-Latency.com ran an online poll asking whether Microsoft or Sun Microsystems was better at offering low latency solutions. The result: 30 percent went with Sun, seven percent with Microsoft. But the majority - 63 percent - reckoned neither company is a player in this space.

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If you’ve been in the industry as long as I’ve been here, then you too probably are aware that many new hot concepts have a familiar, and dated, ring to them. I was at a WFIC session on direct feeds last week when a panelist from JP Morgan Chase commented that direct feeds caused him “the most pain, sometimes for seemingly little gain.” That took me back …
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I am here in the lovely town of Newport, RI for this year’s World Financial Information Congress. Very much enjoying my stay at the quaint and historic Jail House Inn, just a few minutes walk across the causeway to where the conference is taking place - a Hyatt that looks much like a parking garage from a distance.
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I’ve been absent from the blogosphere for a little while. It’s been the silly season and it seemed a good time to take a break. But with my annual Pimm’s party, Labor Day and the Office 2.0 conference behind me, I reckoned it was time to start writing again.
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In the world of low latency, it seems that benchmarks are headline news. Having readily available figures showing xxx microseconds and yyy hundreds of thousands of updates per second is a pretty sure way to get some press coverage for one’s product. Indeed, I find myself asking of vendors who are pushing their new datafeed handler, or complex event processing engine, “So, got any benchmarks for it?”

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I’m in the green and pleasant land, aka England, trying to partake in some R&R. But I can’t escape work, even when I am in historic Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace and later home of William Shakespeare. It seems the Bard knew a thing or two about low latency, or at least about leveraging it.
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The first SIA (now SIFMA) show I attended was in 1986. In some ways, it was quite different to the event last week, while in other ways it was pretty much the same.
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I’m referring to last week’s SIFMA Technology Management Conference and Exhibit in NYC. True, the new name (the result of the SIA’s merger with the Bond Association) was a bit of a put off - many people suggested that SIFMA sounded like some horrible strain of bird flu - but otherwise it’s been the best SIA (sic) Show I’ve been to in years.

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I’m writing this posting from Montreal, Canada, where I just watched a thrilling Formula 1 grand prix, won by British rookie Lewis Hamilton. An amazing achievement in only his sixth F1 race. So what has F1 got to do with low latency?
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A couple of weeks ago, together with Reuters, we conducted a survey of the marketplace to find out how well latency measurement is entrenched, and what users thought of datafeed providers and measurement tool vendors. And we asked them to comment on their current market data handling infrastructures too.

One figure that came back - which I had an instant gut reaction against - is that 39 per cent of respondents reckon their systems are adequate to cope with increasing market data volumes. To me, this number seemed just too high, given what we are being told to expect about data rates from OPRA, etc. A further 31 per cent reckoned their systems would be able to cope following planned upgrades.
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I’m writing this blog from the Red Carpet Club at SFO … heading back to NYC in an hour. It’s been a great week out here in the Bay Area catching up with some old friends and making some new ones.

Earlier in the week, I attended the Open Source Business Conference. One of the highlights was a panel featuring Jason Maynard, an analyst with Credit Suisse. He’s very forthright with his views, and sometimes they hurt. A few weeks ago he downgraded Tibco’s stock, in part because of the emergence of the open source messaging project known as AMQP.
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I am posting this from the San Francisco Bay Area, and it just struck me that a couple of major players from these parts were recently the subject of posts on this portal.  What’s more, they are companies that – despite being once huge on Wall Street – I hadn’t expected to be covering in connection with the world of low latency.  I speak of Sybase and Sun Microsystems.
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So, those party animals at Activ Financial have invited me to a little gathering tonight - at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square - to formally launch ActivFeed MPU, their new hardware-accelerated feed handling software.  It should be an great event, and I’m looking forward to finding out more about the black art of programming FPGAs (that’s Field Programmable Gate Arrays) - an emerging technology that could have a huge impact on low latency systems.
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The one constant in the world of financial markets IT is that nothing stays the same for very long. The world of market data feeds and the applications that process them is no exception.

As data rates increase, and as processing systems (or any component of them) are upgraded and modified, performance can be hit. The trick is to constantly monitor the environment to pre-empt potential problems. But what should one monitor?

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