Tervela Message Medium Blog

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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