I am in Bellevue, Washington today and tomorrow for a meeting of Microsoft partners in financial services.  The meeting is in one of Microsoft’s many local offices.  (If any of my loyal Microsoft readers want to get together, please contact me and we’ll work something out.)

The financial services IT market is going through some interesting times at the moment (in the Chinese curse sense of the phrase).  Opportunities abound — but they’re shifting.   At Digipede, we only see a small piece of that market.  I’m looking forward to learning how our colleagues among other Microsoft partners (and in the Microsoft Financial Services Group) see that market — and how we can go after new opportunities together.  

Tags: Digipede, financial-services, Microsoft

OK, we do a lot of Webcasts, and I don’t plug most of them here, but I’ll call attention to this one.  Dan and I have an MSDN Webcast called “Scaling SOA in Financial Services with Grid Computing for .NET” on June 12 at 10:00 AM Pacific time – mark your calendar now.  Here’s the MSDN description:

Enterprise architects in financial services are looking to service-oriented architectures (SOA) to address many real-world problems – brittle systems with tight interdependencies, data stuck in single-purpose silos, and applications that don’t scale to meet growing demand, to name a few.  But implementing an SOA can also expose new scalability issues.  New high-performance computing (HPC) offerings from Microsoft and its partners are ideally suited for scaling out compute-intensive components of an SOA.  Using real-world examples from financial services companies, this presentation will describe how to grid-enable compute-intensive analytic services for use in an SOA.  

You can sign up for the event here.  (True, somehow all references to Digipede, John Powers, and Dan Ciruli are omitted from this description, but it’s us nevertheless.)  Hope to see you there!

Tags: Digipede, financial-services, grid-computing, Microsoft, MSDN, SOA, Webcast

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

On Wednesday, December 6, Microsoft, Digipede, and other Microsoft HPC partners will host a half-day informational event describing how to achieve faster “time to insight” from computationally intensive financial applications. 

Nathan Trueblood and I will be there (with one or more Digipede customers and a bunch of our friends from Microsoft) to help make this a great event for anyone in financial services who needs more computing horsepower for their Windows applications.

I’ll present information on how the Digipede Network integrates with and adds value to Microsoft’s entire technology stack, inclulding the new Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS), Visual Studio 2005, .NET, Excel 2007, SharePoint 2007, and more.  We’ll run through some real-world examples of how our financial services customers use the Microsoft / Digipede solution to make more money by dramatically improving application performance and scalability.

One of Digipede’s clients will also be a featured speaker at this event.

Date:  Wednesday, December 6, 2006
Time:  Welcome, 8:30; event 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM
Location:  1290 Avenue of the Americas - 6th floor, New York (that’s between 51st and 52nd street in the Axa Equitable building)

Registration and other details:  http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?culture=en-US&eventid=1032306637&x=15&y=14

We hope to see you there!

Tags: Digipede, finance, financial-services, grid-computing, high-performance-computing, HPC, Microsoft, Partnering with Microsoft

Big Webcast today — Hear UBS Director of IT Eric Kristoff, Microsoft Industry Architect Stevan Vidich, and yours truly expound on the wonders of grid computing in the financial services industry.  Go here:

http://www.xtalks.com/gridcomputing.ashx

Tags: Eric-Kristoff, finance, financial-services, grid-computing, John-Powers, Microsoft, presentation, Stevan-Vidich, UBS, Webcast