Tervela Message Medium Blog | pete harris

Now that we’ve recovered from SIFMA 2009, I wanted to share some thoughts from the floor.  For accuracy, it’s the 2009 Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association Technology Management Conference & Exhibit.  Whew.  Let’s stick with “SIFMA.”

First off, SIFMA 2009 was different from SIFMA 2008, which was different from all other previous ones as well.  That’s how tradeshows go:  each one has a different personality, much like the children in a family.  Fewer attendees?  Yes.  Third floor of the venue closed?  Yes.  But so what?  We knew this going in, adjusted our plan accordingly and had an outstanding event.  What does that mean?  We had twice the number of scoped project discussions on enterprise messaging systems than we had last year.  A 100% increase, not to mention the number of follow-on meetings.  We didn’t have many tire kickers or “tourists” as a press person remarked to me.  Pete Harris from A-Team Group expressed similar positive observations in his recent post.

We introduced the Tervela TMX-500 Message Switch, had the hottest booth at the show (literally or pun intended) and staffed it with our team members who do real-world messaging projects.  I’ll save the TMX-500 discussion for another post, but I was either part of or witness to some of the most poignant discussions on messaging philosophy and architecture that I’ve heard in some time.  That’s why we were there.  That’s why people attended.

Finally, what’s the scoop with this “Wicked Hot Message Sauce” theme?  Candidly, it came to me several months ago during an early, weekend morning caffeine infusion at Starbucks.  I was reflecting on a comment made by an IT executive last year about his desire to “spice up” his application performance.  The rest, of course, is obviously history.  I did take some grief from my New York colleagues about the word “wicked” and my inability to stray from my Boston roots.  Frankly, that wasn’t even in the equation.  I used it in the context of something more powerful than “freakin’.”  I’ll close, however, with some of my Bostonian vernacular:  check out Tervela's TMX-500; it’s wicked awesome.

P.S. To all the great attendees, press, analysts, friends, partners and vendors who stopped by our booth:  Thank you for making the show wonderful.

Cheers,
=rob.ciampa

Tags: sifma (2) securities industry and financial markets association (1) pete harris (2) tmx-500 (2) 

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I really like industry events: the intensity; the competitiveness; the pithy debates; the BS; the incredible concentration of opportunity. The good ones have the pulse and cacophony of a third-world bazaar. The evening parties aren’t too bad either, especially when they’re in New York or Las Vegas.

Fortunately, we had High Performance on Wall Street 2008 in New York this week. It was at the Roosevelt Hotel, La Grande Dame from La Belle Époque. I felt out of place without my frock suit and top hat, but mentally returned to the 21^st century and enjoyed the healthy debates on in-line risk calculations, low latency, complex event processing, co-lo architecture, etc.

Candidly, with all the market animation this week, it was tough to gauge what the atmosphere would be going in to the event. With rare exceptions (“Hey, where’s the Lehman dude on the panel?”) things went rather smoothly. Hats off to Pete Harris for keeping things lively and moving.

I very much enjoyed the session “Gaining First Mover Advantage with a Low Latency Market Data Solution.” I skipped the concurrent “Low Latency Market Data Distribution – Software and Hardware Approaches” panel because I work with Barry Thompson and get to eat, drink and debate with him all the time. What struck me about the first panel was a very poignant comment made by an excellent panelist. He commented on the market obsession with low latency and the collective failure to account for devastating effect of outliers – late, non-low-latency information. Algos just don’t like outliers and it screws many of them up. Outliers are low-latency impurity. 99.44% pure is good for Ivory Soap, but it’s not good enough for today’s environments.

This subject deserves much more scrutiny. Outliers undermine low latency. Maybe a debate on this at the Roosevelt next year?

=rob.ciampa

Tags: low-latency (1) outliers (1) pete harris (2) high performance on wall street (1) 

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