Web services and messaging — better together
In the late 70s, Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups struck advertising gold with a memorable campaign in which people accidentally blended chocolate and peanut butter only to discover that they were “two great tastes that taste great together!”
Blogging about web services and cloud computing may not be as much fun as writing a commercial for a tasty treat, but today’s announcement that Solace has partnered with Layer7 Technologies reminded me of that same idea: two things that are independently useful, and even better together.
Financial regulatory reform is just beginning
The press headlines are (mostly) celebrating passage of the financial reform act. I even got a bulk email from the president saying it was a great day for the little guy and a bad day to be a banking special interest guy. Then he asked me for 5 bucks and encouraged me to send the note on to 6 other people in my town. Wait, did the president just send me a chain letter?
But the reality is that financial reform is not at the finish line; the practical side of reform hasn’t even glimpsed the starting line. Financial reform is an agreement that more regulation and consumer protections need to be in place, but does little to define what those regulations or protections might be. There are some broad stroke intents related to making derivatives trading more transparent and changes in capital requirements that are fairly straight forward. But what information regulators will require from banks or specifics on how risk management will change are not yet understood. We don’t even know which bodies will do the regulating, or what their mandates will be.
Turbo-charging the events in complex event processing
When complex event processing was in its infancy around ten years ago, it felt like a byproduct of academia, which in fact it was. In the beginning, it was clearly a solution looking for a problem. Early products were more akin to proofs of concept than anything else.
A lot has changed, though, and CEP offerings have evolved into the equivalent of next generation app servers. Those early customer deployments of many years ago, along with years of refinement and optimization, have made CEP an essential piece of the financial application puzzle.
Sensors the only sensible answer for protecting the oceans
As we have all watched the tragic drama in the gulf unfold over the last two months, it occurs to me that information technology will inevitably play a much bigger role in the future of offshore drilling. Even absent catastrophic problems like we have seen with the Deepwater Horizon rig, there’s no doubt we need better mechanisms for dealing with monitoring offshore wells.
In fact, the handling of this crisis is giving us a glimpse of the future of safety in open water drilling, now that money is less of an object. Here are a couple of recent articles that caught my eye:
- BP oil spill update: sensors measure spill — BP has installed sensors near the wellsite to improve their ability to estimate how much oil is spilling into the gulf. Some of the harshest criticisms have been around their inability to accurately determine how bad the situation is at “ground zero”. Sensors will help them more accurately understand oil flows and estimate what percentage they are capturing, as well as what degree of response is needed for the remainder.
- ‘Gliding’ robots patrol Gulf oil spill — BP has deployed water drones to swim around the gulf and measure data such as temperature, salinity and organic materials. By providing a much more accurate and real-time picture of the oil plume, that data will aid the planning and execution of containment and cleanup efforts.
Avoiding the potential carnage of high-speed trading
When it comes to car crashes, running into a wall twice as fast causes a lot more than double the damage. The same principle applies to trading systems: as the market accelerates and financial firms execute trades at breakneck pace, the potential impact of problems with their IT infrastructure increases exponentially.
So when it comes to keeping track of the behavior of their trading systems, looking in the rear view mirror doesn’t cut it. Firms need to be on top of any problems that affect their trading operations, whether they’re in the acquisition and flow of market data, the automated execution of trades, or the pre and post-trade risk management that keeps things in balance.
For Solace customers engaged in high-speed trading, one of our major advantages is the highly-granular real-time operational visibility we give system administrators. Our solution uses takes advantage of the parallel nature of hardware to provide real-time per-client statistics that software-based systems can’t without impacting performance, and many of which can’t be collected at all in multicast environments.
Hardware’s unique advantages highlighted in Solace V5.0
As a more or less happy iPhone 3G user, I will confess that I had the live event playing in my browser when Sir Jobs was unveiling the sexy new features coming in the iPhone4. It’s an exciting day when something that you’ve come to rely on gets a new set of capabilities, and I invested some time thinking about whether a HD Video, multi-tasking or video conferencing would be useful to me. For Solace customers, today is just like that launch day as we released V5.0 of our Solace message router firmware. The only difference between the two is our launch doesn’t have live blogs, video streams, fanboys or CNN coverage. But I bet our demo would have worked.
A bit of history will help to put V5 in context. In our V3 release, the majority of features were aimed at creating hardware versions of features previously available in software products. There is a core set of capabilities that you just must have to be in the game, and our innovation then was focused on making existing messaging features faster or easier to deploy and manage. In V4 about half of the features introduced were rounding out legacy messaging capabilities, and the other half was introducing new capabilities.
2010 World Cup: Bet on Solace and NovaSparks
Over the past two to three years financial services firms have gone from viewing hardware appliances as a curiosity to viewing them as a necessity. There are three key reasons that hardware has caught on:
- Performance — for high-volume, highly repetitive tasks, special-purpose chips such as FPGAs, network processors and GPU’s have consistently been shown to outperform software running on general purpose CPUs. For many use cases, especially relating to market data and trading, performance alone is enough of a justification to choose hardware.
- Simplicity — the turnkey nature of many appliances such as messaging middleware, ticker plants, monitoring tools and security enforcement is appealing to many firms. They are so much easier and less costly to procure, deploy and configure that firms can focus on what they do best instead of getting bogged down with implementation details.
- Low TCO — appliances can often do the work of many equivalent servers running software, which significantly reduces the overall cost of operating an application or infrastructure.
Two Sigma Investments chooses Solace JMS
We are pleased to announced that Two Sigma Investments has chosen Solace’s JMS messaging to be the foundation of a wide range of their trading applications. They’ve been working with Solace for a while now and plan to go live on initial applications this month.
I found the following self-description on the web that sums them up nicely:
Two Sigma Investments is a leading technology and finance firm founded in 2001. At Two Sigma, we work each day in small teams to develop and apply disciplined, process-driven investment trading strategies. Our casual culture celebrates rigorous thought and encourages true innovation. While we’re focused on the financial markets, technology is the driving force behind our business. In fact, many say that our unique SoHo offices in Manhattan have the look and feel of a software firm. Sounds good to us!
We are pleased to welcome Two Sigma to our growing list of hedge fund customers, and we thank them for allowing us to publicly share the details of their selection of Solace.
Latency arbitrage: a tax credit for low latency traders
Latency arbitrage is in the news again today, as the Wall Street Journal published a story titled Fast Traders’ New Edge. This “edge” is not exactly a “new” trading technique, or even a new story. It has been well chronicled over the last year in the press. In fact, the Journal published an article more than a year ago on precisely the same topic. But it is a popular topic, the equivalent of business tabloid news. There is no shortage of populist anger over Wall Street moneymaking tactics and it is easy to line up industry experts to sound off on the unfairness of it all.
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AMQP v1.0 to be unveiled in San Diego
When you think San Diego, what do you think of? The beautiful waterfront, the San Diego Zoo, Legoland, and of course, interoperable messaging protocols.
Next week the 2nd annual AMQP “face to face” meeting will again be held in San Diego, California. As with last year, the first day will be open to the public (Jun 8), and the next two days (Jun 9, 10) will be for members only.
If you haven’t been paying attention, AMQP V1.0 is firming up . Last week the protocol was voted to “recommended” status which means no more changes (only provable defect fixes are allowed). The biggest change that comes with the V1.0 release is that future releases must maintain backwards compatibility, which significantly reduces the risk of building applications or products using AMQP.
I’ll post another update after the meetings with some detail from the official V1.0 announcement.