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.