2008 SIFMA Report

I spent a few exhausting hours at SIFMA on Tuesday, the opening day.

Lots of attendees, but at times, it seemed like the marketing people outnumbered the attendees.

I spent a while at the Aleri booth, looking at their new 3.0 version. I am glad to see that they adopted some of my concerned about usability. Configuring adapters seems to be dead-easy now. They have come out with a new doc set. Their Aleri Studio has some major improvements. Jeff Wooten told me that they did not have to make too many improvements in their engine, as they felt that the engine was already pretty performant. That's good to hear .... but the STAC benchmarks will be the final authority on that.

I ended up spending quite a bit of time at the Progress Apama booth, mostly in the company of fellow STAC Council member Louie Louvas. I finally got to meet John Bates, who had been convincing me through email to come and pay Apama a visit. I got to see some MonitorScript in action. Very powerful and flexible, but as I told Louie, it is so close to C#/Java that, at first blush, it might compete against a custom C#/Nesper or Java/Esper solution. I would need to dive into Apama in depth to see it in all of its glory, but it definitely peaked my interest.

Of course, the next day, there was the blockbuster announcement of the pair-up between Wombat and Apama. Even though it must have come as a shock to Coral8, I was not surprised. Coral8 is one of the CEP companies that does not have a separate vertical application for trading. I, for one, would love for Coral8 to come out with a commercial product which shows that they eat their own dog food with regards to trading apps.

I spent some time with my old friends Neil and Stevan from Microsoft at their booth. Nothing much new going on there. I finally got to meet Robert from Panopticon. The STAC guys were there in their lab coats. Ran into Brian from Reuters, where I found out that he has taken over responsibility for the market data APIs. Nice to reconnect with all of these people. SIFMA is all about schmoozing and re-establishing connections.

Lots of messaging and hosting solutions. Not on my radar right now, although they will be next year.

I am so glad that I don't have to do booth duty at trade shows any more. My first booth was in 1984, at the very first Unix Expo at the Javitz Center in New York, where I was showing off my Unix word processor.

After SIFMA closed for the day, there was a nice party given by the Coral8 folks. I was glad to meet people like Jaime, Eric, Paul, Josh, Ted, Tom, and others. I sat next to Terry Cunningham, and we swapped airplane stories. It was heartening to hear that other customers are pumping a lot of data at fast rates through Coral8 without much problems. It is also good to hear that we were not the only company who gives the Coral8 support and engineering staff a hard time.

To cap off the night, while the Coral8 party was going on, there were severe storms in New Jersey with 75 mph winds. Lots of downed trees and storm damage, and New Jersey Transit cancelled all of the trains. I had an interesting time trying to find my way home.... Next time, I won't hesitate to use the company car service.


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

SIFMA again

It's that time of the year again, and the second week of June usually means the annual SIFMA conference in at the Hilton in New York. June 10th is the first day of the conference, and the one that features the good parties. I will be walking around the show that day, most likely with my badge in my pocket so that I don't get accosted by vendors.

It will be interesting to hear how vendors are coping with the IT spending slowdown in Capital Markets. You cannot turn around without hearing of another round of layoffs or budget cuts at some financial firm. There will be 7000 less people in the financial sector in a few weeks, as JPM severs the tie with half of Bear Stearns. Lehman and Morgan Stanley have been having stealth layoffs. (I am quite amazed at some of the people who have been laid off from Morgan Stanley in the past few weeks, including a few Executive Directors). HereIsTheCity.com is reporting that most IB's have cut consulting rates from 10 to 20%.

However, I am hoping for a good show, and a chance to reconnect with former colleagues and friends. I am most interested in cool data visualizations and analysis tools, new products in the CEP space, and most of all, T-Shirts !!!


©2008 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved