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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Back in the luvvy-duvvy days of dot.com, when you used to wear polo shirts and kaki’s to the office, and even Peter Job smiled, the major and not-so-major telecommunications companies and network companies saw financial services as a kind of El Dorado.With bandwidth to the desktop everywhere, whole strings of client relationships would be supported by virtual wide area networks, running on these companies’ dark fiber. It all seemed very exciting.

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Bored with ECNs? Yeah, so are we. It seems there’s been an awful lot of fuss in electronic equity markets in the past year or two, as all the while the media tells us that stocks and shares are dead.

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