Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Less Reliance on Vendors

Even though there are a lot of things to be desired about working at Morgan Stanley, I must say that they have got the right idea about lessening their reliance on vendors. Their EIA group has their own XML-based pub/sub message bus (CPS), their own market data infrastructure (Filter), their own .NET client-side framework, and more. What they have done is cut companies like Tibco out of the loop, and are no longer beholden to vendor release cycles, upgrade fees, and huge licensing costs. Morgan owns the source, and has the staff to maintain and enhace their IP. In fact, a friend of mine at Morgan told me that, if they wanted to, Morgan could take CPS and give Tibco a run for their money.

©2006 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It sounds like Morgan has made a significant investment in their development staff. The question is always why should we invest in smart people when we can easily outsource tasks to the great unwashed. Personally I share Spolsky's view on this which is a small team of quality developers exceeds the sum of their parts in terms of productivity versus a greater quantity of cheaper developers. Would that more time were devoted to quality software development versus the politics of who controls the larger head-count/budget.

Anonymous said...

And they mitigated their dependence on the compiler vendors by developing their own language: A+ ;)

Anonymous said...

in-house infrastructure carries the larger risk that the original team dissipate or disappear and the code goes unsupported - with vendors you're buying the pain but guaranteeing it's future.