Just returned from London, where 2 inches of snow managed to shut down most of the city. Even the newscasters on Sky News were lamenting the fact that London (with one week of advance warning) cannot seem to deal with white powder.

Got together with some ex-colleagues, who were marvelling at the Lodnon consulting market.
The hot areas are Grid Computing, with the prevelant stack being DataSynapse and Tangasol. Also demand is picking up for WPF, with Morgan Stanley leading the way. The daily rates for qualified individuals are about 1000 pounds per day, which at the current exchange rates, is about $2000.

There is a well-known financial consulting firm who shut down its London offices last year, telling employees that they were losing money and that there was no money to be made in the London market. Hmmmmmm.....

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft's Compute Cluster Server and Digipede can make any inroads intot his market. There seems to be a very strong bias against using .NET for a grid infrastructure, something which I hope to see turned around in 2007.

I got a chance to walk around Canary Wharf a bit more this time. I hope that JL gets to go to the Gaucho Grill (Argentinian Steaks) and Nobu (Japanese) on his upcoming trip. But I need to have TS take JL out for a night of karaoke, and take some pictures to prove it! (Our karaoke outing got cancelled because of the snow .... to the relief of the collective ears of the London Equities Architecture group!)

©2007 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved