Wednesday, June 24, 2009

SIFMA 2009

Not much to write about SIFMA this year. I was warned by a friend that it was a ghost-town on the first day. I went to SIFMA on the second day, which is usually the most attended day, and unfortunately, my friend was correct.

In 2008, SIFMA has 350 vendors, but this year, they had 201 vendors, which is a decrease of about 42%. The side corridors used to be jammed with small vendors, but they were totally barren this year. Many large vendors were conspicuously absent, like Sungard and Reuters and Intel. Cust0mer traffic was way down, and in most booths, vendors were conversing with other vendors.

Sorry folks ... not much to write about here .....

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

2 comments:

Mark Palmer, StreamBase CEO said...

Hi Marc - It's true general traffic was down, and a few big guys (Reuters, SunGuard), didn't show up.

But I'm surprised you weren't tracking some of the CEP announcements, figured you would have something to say. We had lots of activity, driven primarily by the CME Group selection news - an enterprise-wide adoption announcement by CME was massive CEP industry news - and their use cases, etc. were new stuff for our favorite industry, don't you think? It was covered nicely all over the place, here's a sample from Wall Street & Technology:

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/technology-risk-management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218100837&pgno=2

IBM was pretty active talking about CEP as well, a bunch of our customers checked out there latest technology, and, although it's not very "real" yet, they are certainly talking it up. From an academic perspective they are doing some interesting research on elastic grid techniques & CEP - did you see any of it? Curious about your reaction. One of our customers was involved in the experiments they have done...

Apama announced a nice win for BondDesk's ATS and some product Accelerators, which isn't really CEP, but interesting use case stuff. Their booth was busy I hung out with the guys for a little bit on Tuesday. Lime connectivity announcement was good - Lime is getting some traction - we announced that earlier this year... Here was the Apama news summary:

http://apama.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/06/apama-sifma-09-announcements.html

Aleri didn't seem to do much - the Correlix stuff seemed like a Barney release ("I love you, you love me"). I thought I saw they announced an OEM deal but couldn't find the press release.

And we touched off a firestorm around the Twitter connectivity announcement - some crazy comments, but there was actually some really good balanced debate about it. Again, WS&T did a very nice article on the whole issue in the context of trading:

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/data-management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218101018

Most importantly, we were swamped with prospects at the booth, and customers, etc. So I'm not sure what you mean by "quiet," but it didn't seem quiet to me!

- Mark

Anonymous said...

First time in 5 or 6 years I didn't bother registering. Funny thing tho - there is significant change at the infrastructure level that will ultimately have a dramatic impact on trading apps.

Multicore really is here - not just quad & dual quad servers. Small to large trading companies are embracing Infiniband and investigating 10gbe for more than just trunking. The Oracle purchase and lack of concrete latency/capacity are leading some to question the long term prospects for Java. Power/Cooling and "performance per watt" now integral decision making metrics.
Hardware accelerated devices although still with significant Enterprise limitations are now beyond their infancy.

Change is painful and there are a lot of fads during boom times. Necessity ultimately drives evolution so this is a great time for new technology if it really does have significant value.

-PG