Stac Council Meeting Recap

On July 30th, 2008, Stac Research had a general meeting of Stac Council members and associated vendors. Bob from Deutsche Bank was the generous host who managed to procure the Deutsche auditorium for the event.

There was a really good turnout given the fact that it was a hot summer's night in prime vacation season. Peter told me that about 175 people said that they would attend, and I would estimate the final figure at around 100 people.

The event was divided into 3 parts.

Stac had invited 10 vendors to give (exactly) 5 minute pitches on their products. The vendors that presented included IBM, HP, Sun, Solace, Tervela, Violin, Azul, Exegy, ServerEngines, and Bay Micro. All presented their solution for HPC on Wall Street. (Not a single mention of .NET that night .... where were you, Microsoft, and why aren't you on the Stac Council?)

There were two short presentations on the current state of the Stac M1 (Market Data) and E1 (Event Processing) working groups, given by Rob Wallos of Citi and yours truly.

Following the presentations was a cocktail hour, where there was actually a DeutscheBank labeled red wine! Everyone saw a lot of old Wall Street faces, ex-bosses, former colleagues, competitors, etc, and it was nice to reminisce with some of the folks who I haven't seen for years.

Several people from the large vendors approached me with questions about how they could join the Stac A1 working group. What it seems to me is that CEP still needs a lot of publicity, as people are not exactly sure about how to approach it. Only Ralph Frankel from Solace acknowledged the existence of CEP in his presentation, and offered a solution about how Solace can accelerate CEP-based apps. Solace is certainly a company that is on my radar, as it has been mentioned to me by several colleagues.

It's my opinion that, if a company really has a compelling HPC solution for Wall Street, membership in Stac is mandatory. Eventually, non-members will be conspicuous by their absence.

©2008 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved.
All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.