Tervela Message Medium Blog | options industry conference 2009

In a previous post, I mentioned the Options Industry Conference 2009.  Given the importance of messaging to business performance, the conference organizers put together a panel on Friday, May 1, 2009 entitled: The Tech Arms Race (Messaging: The Key to Being Faster).  Barry Thompson, founder of Tervela will be speaking, so no doubt it will be pithy, relevant and opinionated.

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.

=rob.ciampa

Tags: options industry conference 2009 (2) messaging (5) 

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The Options Industry Conference 2009 begins today in Florida.  What I like about this event is that it's a great venue for looking at the business and technical aspects of the razor's edge in financial services: options processing.  One of our hedge fund customers summed it up best:

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.

=rob.ciampa

Tags: options industry conference 2009 (2) messaging (5) options processing (1) messaging middleware (1) 

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