Powers Unfiltered

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.