Why is this man smiling?

Whether you’re expecting an audit or a lawsuit, it’s always good to have a paper trail. Enter Fortiva. This archive service offloads the entire process to a set of secure, hosted servers and offers the CIO or compliance officers an easy to navigate dashboard for picking out emails, even out of a massive database. The service is SEC 17a-4 compliant and fingerprints messages for authenticity, ensuring hackers don’t get in and change all your “buys” to “sells.”

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AJAX and data push make beautiful music together. The value is two-fold: customers get useful, attractive interfaces while ensuring that the data in question — be it numerical or even headline news — arrives on their desk fresh, crispy, and with little latency.

Lightstreamer provides a push engine for data distribution that sends information to any compatible browser. They have four products, seemingly named after Starbuck’s drink sizes (Moderato, Allegro, etc.) The heaviest package, Vivace, includes SDK for web client and .NET developm,ent along with unlimited concurrent users and thick or zero client support, depending on your in-house needs.

The software is free on a trial basis while pricing depends on the implementation (”One Moderato, please, my good man!”) and number of seats.

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FEN (Financial Engineering News) recently published their fifth annual report on Software for Financial Engineering and Risk Management. After surveying 18 companies, one of their primary findings was that speed remains a critical factor in financial systems:

Nearly all the firms we surveyed cited customer demands for greater speed (without loss of accuracy) with their software systems. And “speed” is defined not only by how quickly a result (a VaR, a price, etc.) can be calculated but also how quickly a new analytical tool and be created, prototyped and implemented across an organization. Two major trends driving this need for speed include continued financial product innovation – specifically increasingly complex products – and the regulatory requirements for real-time enterprise risk management systems that can collect, aggregate and analyze data across multiple activities and capture the combined effects various risk exposures: market, credit, operational, liquidity and so on.

Fortunately, there is a revolution occurring in both hardware and software for financial engineering that is enabling companies to meet this demand. 64-bit computing is already a reality and many firms are quickly adapting their software to take full advantage of the processing speeds afforded by this advance. But at the same time, software providers also realize that speed is as much dependent on innovative algorithms and approaches to computational tasks like optimization and other numerical techniques that converge on answers quickly and efficiently. The need for speed is also being met by providing common service architectures for entire financial management systems (i.e., enhanced performance through better integration) and other novel approaches like cluster or grid computing where complex analyses are shared across multiple central processing units (CPUs) or distinct computer systems.

It’s good to see that there is work in the financial systems space that doesn’t rely solely on more powerful hardware to improve performance. The job of squeezing out more speed is a two step phase, better algorithms that take advantage of better hardware. Go and read the rest of this interesting survey.

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ZdNet.co.uk has a piece about how Microsoft will be acquiring a number of niche security players to bolster its platform and Vista in particular.

I can’t help but feel the whole thing feels a bit piecemeal and Band-Aid-like:

“We will lock Vista down as much as we can. We hope Vista won’t have too many security disadvantages, but if it does we will address those as fast as we can [through Microsoft security products],” said Kutwaroo.

And then there’s the reality that such a strategy is not likely to entice large scale enterprises, like say, Wall Street, which the good folks at ZD had the sense to point out:

Security analyst Andy Buss of Canalys predicted that Microsoft would have a bigger impact on the consumer market with its OneCare security service than in the business arena with Forefront.

“Microsoft is not proven in the enterprise security space,” said Buss. “It will take longer to penetrate large businesses, which are naturally cautious [of unproven technology],” said Buss.

Although I like to complain, sometimes it’s no wonder why OS upgrades are so slow going at financial firms.

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IT-Director.com has a good piece on the challenges of leveraging both grid computing and service oriented architectures. Anyone who’s worked in the Wall St. tech space for any length of time knows how rare it is that an enterprise will properly adopt a major new computing paradigm the first go around, so what are the odds that it can be done for two major paradigms at once? I would say they are pretty slim, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying.

Yet the article raises a question that I frequently ponder, what are all these technical paradigms really going to be used for?

But, the question still remains, for what are grid and SOA technologies being used? grid’s history is primarily a high performance computing (HPC) one, and major uses are bleeding into finance, automotive/aerospace design and other heavy number-crunching environments. SOA is being used to support more flexible business processes in many areas.

I think that grids and SOA will be a lot like other over-hyped technical panaceas of days gone by, such as Java. Java is still here and strong as ever, but how many of us are using it for applets inside a web browser vs. back-end processes and serving up web pages? It will be interesting to see what Wall St. does with these technologies in the next several years, but something tells me in the end it will look different than what was originally imagined by the analysts whose job it is to forecast technical trends.

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CNet’s News.com has some reporting on promises from Steve Balmer to push Microsoft to release updates and revisions to Windows on a more regular schedule.

Does anyone see the irony in this? Balmer’s promises were an attempt to please Wall Street analysts. And what business sector is slowest to upgrade its desktop OS installations? Wall Street of course.

Excuse me, I just got a new email I have to read, gotta go spend some quality time with MS Outlook 2000.

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If your office road warriors need to keep in touch, consider SightSpeed. I just gave it a try last week and it worked extremely well, even over a wireless connection hooked up to a cable modem. The audio was very crisp and the video - while a bit laggy at points due to the connection - was better than I’ve seen in a while. It’s a free download and works on both PCs and Macs. A Linux version is also in the works.

The service also includes VoIP to POTS service, similar to SkypeOUT. Rates are about 2-5 cents per minute.

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Laplink just released a new migration tool, PCMover, designed to be a fool-proof way to migrate files and settings from one Windows machine to another. There are two versions - personal and business - and a single copy costs $39.95 while a 10-pack license costs $280.

Best of all? It’s fire and forget, so you can set it up on Mr. Trader’s desk and tell him to go to lunch.

Simply install PCmover on both computers and go! PCmover will determine what files and settings need to be moved. You don’t even have to tell PCmover which applications to move or know the location of your programs or files

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