This column is being written in San Francisco. I’m in town to attend the second running of the Office 2.0 conference, which kicks off tomorrow. It’s very much a Silicon Valley event - vendors, venture capitalists, lawyers and maybe even a user or two. But with 500 plus paying delegates and a host of sponsors, the buzz is already mounting. All the delegates were given an iPhone as part of a collaboration experiment (I am collaborating by sharing a special iMix music playlist that I programmed for the event).

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Most would agree that open source technology can drive down costs of implementation and support, although many say this misses the bigger picture of open source adoption. To them, the rapid deployment and innovation that open source offers are the real benefits.

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We all know that Wall Street is about performance. In these days of low latency everything, it’s all about doing things faster. Once upon a time, the focus was simply on opting for the fastest processor available, and upgrading as soon as a faster model came along. This approach worked up to a point – until it became harder and harder for the chip manufacturers to make their silicon run any faster without catching fire!

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We all know that Wall Street is about performance. In these days of low latency everything, it’s all about doing things faster. Once upon a time, the focus was simply on opting for the fastest processor available, and upgrading as soon as a faster model came along. This approach worked up to a point – until it became harder and harder for the chip manufacturers to make their silicon run any faster without catching fire!

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In A-Team’s latest research, Faster Than a Speeding Bullet – Low Latency Architectures and Building Blocks For Tomorrow’s Trading Applications, we made some predictions, and one of them was: “Basic functions such as datafeed handlers, in-memory databases, messaging middleware and data fabrics will become increasingly commoditised.”

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To many on Wall Street, mention open source and they will immediately equate it with Linux. There’s no doubt that the open source operating system has been a big hit in the financial markets. It was in the right place at the right time as firms were looking to write off their investments in expensive Sun boxes and replace them with cheap x86-based blades.

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When one thinks of technology suppliers in the SOA and Web Services world, it’s names of heavyweights like IBM, HP, BEA and Microsoft that spring readily to mind, followed perhaps by the upstarts, such as WS02, Active Endpoints and Parasoft.

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As Service Oriented Architecture has become increasingly in vogue as a philosophy for building applications, attention has turned to the tools that might be used to create and deploy them. Fundamental to the distributed approach of an SOA is some form of messaging capability for communication between services. Which is what web services are for, surely? Only, it’s not that simple.

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In the old days, there was middleware. The likes of IBM and Tibco made a fortune from selling products to Wall Street to integrate disparate systems, to hook up front and back offices, connect to clearing houses, trade with customers et cetera.

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“Big Bang Blows A Fuse!” read the headline of the Evening Standard on Monday, October 27th back in 1986. It referred to the failure, just minutes after opening, of the London Stock Exchange’s new electronic market and represented a sudden and comprehensive deflation of a bubble of excitement that had been building in the London market for more than three years. And it was a failure that I foresaw, and witnessed close up, since at the time I was working for the exchange’s IT group.

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Marc Alvarez says he wrote his book – Market Data Explained, which is published by the Butterworth-Heinemann imprint of Elsevier this month in the U.K. (next month in North America) – because he was finding it difficult to educate new business analysts and programmers at TAP Solutions, the Vancouver-based data management platform provider that employs him.

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In a fascinating wrap-up session at A-Team’s Market Data Basics training course in New York this month, Tee Williams of A-Team partner Tee Williams Associates, presented a wide-ranging blueprint for an overhaul of the market data industry. Williams, whose many years in the marketplace – we’re too polite to publish just how many that is – makes him one of our industry’s true thinkers, offered attendees a David Letterman-style Top 10 features of a new, so-called ‘flat’ market data business.

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We first got wind of the second of what seems now to be a rash of Reuters chronicles through the infamous Yahoo bulletin board. Reuters – the Illusion of Power, by David M. Robertson, ruffled a few feathers there by suggesting that Reuters’ management had deliberately faked access numbers for 3000 Xtra in analyst briefings and annual reports in 2001-2.

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Once upon a time there was an independent news organization that regularly outscooped its bigger rivals, and built a highly specialized business covering a tightly defined marketplace better than anybody else. Though small, it was profitable and well respected by its readers and the market it covered.

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Hats off this month to Mickey Arora, the former Bridge and Dow Jones Newswires executive who had the audacity to forge a buyout team to acquire MMS from Standard & Poor’s in the midst of a down market. A year on, and the buyout team has sold up, posting a substantial return on a rapid-fire turnaround.

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While a lot of the tech world these days has been raving about Linux and how it’s going to change the world, the folks in Redmond have their own view of the future, and giving away software (unless it’s bundled with Windows to take out a competitor like Netscape) isn’t among them.

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If you take Highway 101 South from San Francisco airport, you’ll soon come across the Liberate Technologies office complex. Right next door, you cannot escape the huge, eye-catching LED billboard operated by SiliconView. It’s a sight to behold, and a beacon of the region’s high-tech mantra.

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As this article is being written, possibly the most important release of Sun’s enterprise Java specification – J2EE 1.4 – is peeking out from the covers of the Java Community Process that’s designed to direct the future of Java in a vendor-neutral way. If all goes well with the beta release, the final specification should be ratified in March or April. And with it, Sun will have caught up a lot of ground it has lost to date in the Web Services world.

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Remember the promise of the Internet? How we were going to enjoy low-cost or free news and market commentary, funded by advertising? How specialist websites would flower like so many daisies, offering insight and expert advice at the click of a mouse?

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This month being the first of a new year, my mission was set as peering into the future to predict what’s coming ITwise over the next 12 months, and maybe a bit further out. Well, it’s hard enough these days trying to figure what is going to happen next week on Buffy (I mean, is Giles really dead?), so it’s with a real leap of faith (no, not Faith as in Buffy – the clever money is on her returning [That’s enough Buffy stuff – Ed.]) that I am embarking on this column. As Gartner would say: 0.x Probability (i.e. don’t blame us if we’re wrong). Still, where x = 0.5 or greater, here we go with some thoughts on technologies, on companies, and on people:

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