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Check out our Message Medium blog to find out what’s going on in the hardware-accelerated, low-latency messaging world. The Tech Arms Race: MessagingApril 30, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Tervela is also at the show in Booth E160. We'll have copies of our latest research and deployments of messaging in the options markets: Options Advantage Through Infrastructure Transformation - Driving Profitability and Market Leadership. I'll be posting it to the Tervela site soon.
Thoughts for the Options Industry Conference 2009April 30, 2009 at 8:45 am
You can't approach options processing with an equities mentality. I have corollary: You can't approach contemporary data-intensive business challenges with a legacy messaging middleware mentality. Some other thoughts:
New business demands and archaic messaging systems. Massive growth in options market data, amplified by greater order processing and algorithmic demands for low-latency and fan-out are crippling messaging systems, resulting in lost data, information slippage and system failures. These all equate to position and market exposure.
More complexity = more risk. Disparate systems drive complexity and, ironically, impact other systems. Problems in one area frequently affect other areas, making the tuning and debugging complex and dangerously time-consuming. Because these systems are so tightly-coupled, recovery becomes non-deterministic and predictability goes away.
Adding more resources doesn’t solve problem. In fact, it creates more problems with complexity, rack space, operations, and cost. This is the old model: throw more systems at the problem; partition the symbols even more; add more routers and switches; and hope it improves. The net result is more stuff to manage and more things to go wrong.
Manageability is not an option. Lack of control and visibility is a legacy shortcoming of traditional messaging systems. Not having the insight in the critical messaging function is an unacceptable excuse when a firm is out of the market. You can’t manage what you can’t see.
Tags: options industry conference 2009 (2) messaging (5) options processing (1) messaging middleware (1) Comments (0) 
Market Data Tide is Coming InApril 28, 2009 at 9:30 pm So here we are sitting on the dock, watching the sunset and reminiscing about the good old days of Lehman, Bear, and - geez - even Madoff. We watch the tide go out and get lost in the moment. In the old days, this would be a full page ad in some retirement magazine. (Given the state of our 401(k)s, we'll probably have a walker next to us on the dock.) Suddenly, the wind changes direction and the tide starts coming in, awaking us from our respite.
I'm not sure what prompted this beach imagery; perhaps it was the unseasonably warm weather in the Northeast these past few days. I do, however, blame Melanie Rodier and her recent piece "Financial Firms Face Massive Market Data Infrastructure Challenges" in Wall Street & Technology for the tide analogy. She couples her journalism with some recent research by Adam Honoré at Aite Group. Here is a snippet:
Market data volumes are expected to continue to grow exponentially, further straining market data infrastructures, according to a new report from Aite Group.
We'll shortly see if the tide hits the seawall.
Tags: market data (4) melanie rodier (1) wall street & technology (3) adam honoré (1) aite group (1) Comments (0)
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In a 
Like the tide, the market is now coming back and firms are suddenly awakening and taking
notice. This time, however, it may be a rather high tide. Many firms
that we work with spent the past several months making some much needed
architectural and infrastructure changes - fixing up the dock if we follow our coastal analogy. Other organizations, well, find themselves a bit behind after wrestling with budget and all sorts of other organizational issues, some of which now seem to be abating. They must be careful, though, not to find themselves caught off guard, sitting on a distant sandbar while the tide rushes in. Perhaps it's time to look for a quick return to shore.
