Marc at Magmasystems relates his findings from a recent trip to London, where he says:

Got together with some ex-colleagues, who were marvelling at the Lodnon consulting market.
The hot areas are Grid Computing, with the prevelant stack being DataSynapse and Tangasol. Also demand is picking up for WPF, with Morgan Stanley leading the way. The daily rates for qualified individuals are about 1000 pounds per day, which at the current exchange rates, is about $2000.

And

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft’s Compute Cluster Server and Digipede can make any inroads intot his market. There seems to be a very strong bias against using .NET for a grid infrastructure, something which I hope to see turned around in 2007.

It will be interesting to see, indeed.

The “strong bias” Marc reports is real — in some places.  But the financial services market is large, and surprisingly diverse.  Most of the bias we encounter seems to melt away when customers experience real benefits. 

.NET penetration is large and growing in financial services companies, and .NET workloads are (quite) difficult to adapt to a grid based primarily on Linux and Java.  We don’t have to win the hearts and minds of every Linux-centric grid user to make a big impact in this market. 

In our experience, the bias Marc describes is strongest in IT, which has been taught for years that grid computing means Linux and UNIX almost by definition.  But the developer community is different, and often more in touch with the scalability requirements of specific applications.  These are the hearts and minds Digipede and Microsoft are winning — because adapting applications to the grid needs to be easier, and that’s our strength.  Developers who use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop their applications (.NET, COM, or anything else) find the Digipede Framework SDK provides the most natural approach available for adapting their applications to a grid.

And it’s free, as part of the Digipede Network Developer Edition.  Check it out, .NET developers — it might just be your ticket to 1000 pounds a day!   Here you go. 

Digipede and Microsoft are also working together to win over the IT guys.  With the new Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition (CCE), Microsoft has made the deployment and administration of many servers as easy as one (and dropped the price for compute-grid deployments by about 80% too — you need to check this out).   There is no question that for grid computing deployments in financial services, CCE represents the most cost-effective way to add computing power to a Digipede-based grid.

So - the change Marc is hoping for in 2007 is exactly what we’re working to make happen!

Tags: .NET, DataSynapse, Digipede, dotnet, financial-services, grid-computing, Magmasystems, Microsoft

Digipede’s trip to the Securities Industry Association (SIA) Technology Management Conference went better than planned. With a presence in four locations (the Digipede booth, Microsoft booth, HP booth, and the Microsoft / HP “break room”), we were rocking pretty hard for three days straight.

If you have not been to this event, it is unlike any other trade show I’ve ever attended. Located entirely within the New York Hilton at 1335 Avenue of the Americas (between 53rd and 54th Streets), there are 7000+ attendees, and apparently an equal number of booths. There are booths in the ballrooms, booths in the exhibit halls, booths in the hallways, booths in the pretty much every location but the restrooms (and they crowd right up against those, too). In the exhibit halls, the feel is pretty much “big trade show;” in the hallways, the feel is more “Middle-eastern street market,” or, during peak hours, “mosh pit.”

Many of the major vendors have realized that the “mosh pit” environment is not optimal for a meaningful exchange of information, and have reserved meeting rooms on a separate floor of the hotel for more in-depth demonstrations and discussions. Microsoft and HP used such a room to good effect, with demonstrations of the Digipede Network running on top of the new Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and HP Proliant hardware. Those demos generated lots of attention, such as Darrell Taft’s excellent eWeek article yesterday.

In addition to running demonstrations featuring the Digipede Network, Microsoft also lured visitors to their demo room with free copies of Samir Jayaswal and Yogesh Shetty’s excellent book, Practical .NET for Financial Markets. Yogesh, who was on hand to sign the book and discuss any .NET issue under the sun, is a great resource. I’ve plugged this book before, but if you’re in finance, or a .NET developer in any other field, let me repeat — check it out!

Other grid vendors seemed to have active presence here as well. In addition to the usual suspects like Platform Computing and DataSynapse, GigaSpaces looked like they had some interesting offerings, as did Scientific Computing Associates. I didn’t have time to check out some others, but there were also hardware vendors, integrators, and consultants all talking about grid projects. I’m told that there was a conference session in which somebody high up at Merrill Lynch identified grid computing as the Number One IT priority. That may be an exaggeration, but it’s clearly an indication of increased emphasis.

The message from this show, loud and clear, was that the securities industry’s appetite for grid computing is increasing, that the number of applications for which grid is applicable is increasing steadily, and that Microsoft is making good headway in this market. It’s going to be an exciting summer.

Tags: cluster, Compute Cluster Server, DataSynapse, Digipede, finance, Gigaspaces, grid-computing, HP, Microsoft, platform-computing, Scientific-Computing-Associates, SIA

We get questions about how the Digipede Network compares to Vendor X or Open Source Project Y pretty often; a recent example is from Matt Davey’s Tales from a Trading Desk, where Matt asked:

.NET Grid Computing. Not sure what it’s advantages are over and above
DataSynapse. Would be interested to know if anyone has reviewed Digipede?  

In terms of editorial reviews, you may want to check out a recent comparison of Sun Grid and Digipede in CRN by Mario Morejon, or Mario’s more complete review from last month, or Rick Wayne’s review in Software Development Magazine.

Nat picked up  right away on one of the leading points of differentiation — we’ve put a lot of emphasis on ease of implementation, ease of use, and especially ease of programming.  We’ve looked at a lot of other solutions in the market, and talked with a lot of customers and potential customers.  In our assessment, the main thing holding back the grid computing market is needless complexity.  From Day One, Digipede has made specific market and engineering decisions to strip away complexity.  If this means there are some bells and whistles we omit, great — we’ve yet to lose a sale over a missing bell or whistle, and we’ve closed sales based on our ability to implement our system quickly and painlessly for our customers.

Another key point is right there in Matt’s question — we’re focused on the Microsoft side of the market.  While there are many options on the Linux / Java / IBM side of the market, we’ve made the decision to focus on making the best tools available for Windows, which is the market and technology we know best.  DataSynapse has had a lot of success in the market, and they’ve got happy customers.  They work quite closely with IBM, and for customers who have made certain key platform decisions, that’s great.  For the increasing number of enterprises with a significant commitment to .NET, we offer the best available SDK for Microsoft developers, and the best available integration with the whole Microsoft stack.

There was also a comment about Alchemi on Matt’s blog, which included the statement:

My thoughts are that eventually we’ll see an Open Source product outstrip the main vendors, but that seems like a while off yet.

I have to say — there’s Open Source projects, and Open Source projects.  Linux, Apache, Firefox and others that have gathered a critical mass of users and developers offer some very interesting advantages.  Alchemi is a small project with few users and fewer developers.  It is an interesting proof of concept with some fine technical capabilities, and I’m sure it has some enthusiastic supporters.  I am NOT anti-open-source; find someone else to flame about that.  But when a business decides to adopt a software product (regardless of licensing model), the main costs are not in licensing but in the cost of implementation, integration, training, and daily user experience.  There has to be a certain level of QA, support, and commitment to a roadmap of future enhancements before most businesses will adopt any product, and Alchemi has not crossed that threshhold for any business we’ve encountered; we have yet to lose a sale to a business who was considering Alchemi. 

Tags: .NET, Alchemi, DataSynapse, Digipede, grid-computing, Microsoft