Thursday, April 30, 2009

Things on the Blogging Queue

I have been super busy lately, and have not had much time to blog.

I have a post coming up to talk about the role of Chief Architect and what I do from day to day. Not giving away any secret sauce ... just to explain what the role entails, after I have received a bunch of emails asking me exactly what architects do on Wall Street.

I also want to bitch and moan a bit about Java. I recently had to do some coding of a C# framework, and I needed to deliver a Java-based SDK to some clients. I will dive into this a bit more in a future blog post, but let me tell you that I have a new appreciation for C# 3.0 and Visual Studio.

This article has been among the most widely-read articles on the Wall street & Technology website over the past two weeks.

I am also about to install db4o for the first time and play around with it. Equity-Linked Technology at Merrill (or what's left of it) has made good use of it, so I want to see what they see.


©2009 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved.
All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.

3 comments:

Damir Sudarevic said...

Secret sauce is OK, no need to hold back :)

Anonymous said...

Interesting retrospective spin in describing your evaluation process and how you made your decision. I think the vendors you mentioned would probably describe it as being much different--as did you yourself on your own blog. Moreso seemed that you had decided on Coral8 by the time you went to the 2007 event processing conference. You were blogging that you loved the attention you got from Mark T and Terry C because they fawned all over you and Terry came out to see you in his personal airplane.
http://magmasystems.blogspot.com/2007/11/coral8-update.html
Based on what I've heard, the other vendors were basically column-fodder because C8 was the cheapest and you were already wildly biased toward them before you "invited" others to do POCs. Any business-savvy vendor would read your blog, observe the bias, and bail from a POC knowing they'd be wasting their time, lose the business anyway, AND have you blog about what you didn't like about them. For the record, I do not work for a CEP vendor.

marc said...

Some interesting comment, Anonymous. I am reading the WS&T article over again, and I think that it was pretty accurate in describing the evaluation process.

We had a bias towards Coral8 because of the successes that some colleagues at Merrill Lynch had. But, we certainly went in with an open mind, and the other vendors certainly had an opportunity to win the business.

As far as Terry and the airplane ... I mentioned it in the blog simply because he is a fellow pilot. The fact that he flew out to meet us did not have a factor in the decision. However, the personal attention from their CTO certainly weighed in the decision, as it showed me how responsive the management of the company was to some of our issues. But, Don and Jerry from Aleri were just as responsive and attentive, and they also impressed us.

I think that this blog has been fair in pointing our the pros and the cons of all of the CEP vendors out there. Certainly, this blog has criticized Coral8 pretty severely at times. And, there have been various times during the development process where we wished that a stronger candidate than Coral8 had emerged.

None of the other CEP vendors even came close to bailing on the POC. In fact, even after we had publicly said that we chose Coral8, several of the CEP vendors came to us to ask us if we would reconsider the results of the POC if they were to put in features X, Y and Z for us. Maybe they were not as business-savvy as you might think.

One thing that this blog has always been is brutally honest. Even the vendors who did not win our business mentioned this.