Interesting Topic at STAC Research Conference in New York on Nov 2nd

I am not going to be in New York that day, but STAC has a few topics of interest at their upcoming conference on November 2nd.

"Hadoop for Trading Firms: Beyond the Science Project," by Jack Norris, VP Marketing, MapR


“Standard Technology Benchmarks for Market Risk Platforms,” by Lars Ericson, Director, Citi


It's nice to see someone from Citi presenting :-) Wish they had more people from the client side of things presenting.


©2011 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved. All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.

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.

Aleri and STAC

Congrats to Aleri for being the first CEP vendor to volunteer their product to undergo scrutiny from STAC Research.

STAC first announced this program at last September's Gartner CEP Summit, but I am surprised that none of the other CEP vendors have joined this program. Aleri's participation means one of two things ---- they are very confident in the power of their CEP engine and/or they are willing to pony up the participation fee.

I am interested to see the test cases that STAC comes up with. Hopefully, these test cases will be created by an impartial party.


©2008 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved