When it comes to adopting leading-edge technology, Wall Street is among the first in line, despite the fact that other people's money depends on the street. These days, Wall Street is moving on service-oriented architectures in Linux and grid computing environments.
UBS Investment Bank, for instance, is running grid computing in two categories. One is "specific grid for heavy-duty computing to streamline calculations and make them as fast as possible," said Sheppard Nakier, UBS' chief architect, at the Linux on Wall Street Show & Conference here last week. UBS is also looking at grid computing for employing "fast and cheap processors" in clusters for handling various applications, Nakier said.
As financial services companies consolidate data centers and add computing power to process new, complex algorithms, IT managers are looking to cluster systems and componentized applications. SOAs offer the best way to do that, said Chris Keene, CEO of Persistence Software Inc. Financial services companies ought to "structure software systems as reusable services" or, in other words, move to SOAs and "distribute services to geographically dispersed customers," said Keene, whose San Mateo, Calif., company develops object data management solutions.Although not moving to a complete SOA environment, one foreign-exchange portal based here is working Web services into many of its applications. "We support Web services in general as a way of getting in and out of different systems," said Sean Gilman, chief technology officer at Currenex Inc., adding that the company has about 13 ongoing integration projects.
Gilman said Currenex is migrating from proprietary Sun Microsystems Inc. Unix boxes to Intel Corp.-based Hewlett-Packard Co. machines running Linux. Linux offers better performance and projected reliability, he said.
News source: eWeek
