February 27, 2012

Bloomberg Pushes NEXT Migration

After an approximate $100 million investment and two years of development, Bloomberg successfully migrated a third of its 313,000 Bloomberg Professional Services clients on to its Bloomberg NEXT version of the vendor’s platform, according the senior Bloomberg officials.

The migration began three to four months ago and officials expect to have approximately 90 percent of the Bloomberg clients on the new version by summer before ending support for the legacy version by the end of the year.

Starting tomorrow and going through April, Bloomberg will host Bloomberg NEXT training sessions in 16 cities around the world, where clients can work with a variety of Bloomberg NEXT experts to help with the switchover.

Since Bloomberg officials wait until roughly a third of its customers are on a new offering before speaking with the trade press, most Bloomberg users probably already have had some cursory discussion on Bloomberg NEXT.

However, if you are not a Bloomberg subscriber or have been living in a cave for the past four months to avoid the Republican primary debates, the most important thing to know is that Bloomberg NEXT is the Bloomberg Professional Service. It may have a new name, but it has all of the existing capabilities as well as new ones and without an increase in the monthly or annual license.

February 26, 2012

Unlocking the Value of Your FIX Logs

Some time you just do not know the value of what you have. Just consider the Spaniards who discarded tons of a mysterious silver-colored mineral while mining for gold in the New World, which later would be known as platinum.

The new software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor Cameron Edge sees platinum-quality data hiding in plain sight within FIX engine logs and plans to unlock it with its new FIXinsight analysis platform, which should be announced later this week.

“FIX logs were something that were chucked away at the end of the trading day,” says John Cameron, principal at Cameron Edge. “Some people might store them, but never look at them except when a regulator comes knocking on the door or when clients start shrieking at them.”

February 24, 2012

Community-Driven Innovation in the Capital Markets

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The second episode of the the Daly Post Podcast is ready for download!

In this podcast, we speak with Kosta Peric, the head of Innotribe at messaging cooperative SWIFT about how the organization is working with its members to foster innovation across the industry and what the first fruits of this labor might be.

Enter the Proximity Cloud

Ever since grid and cloud computing popped up on the capital markets’ radar screen, both architectures have been pitched as a cost savings technology that let users spin up virtual servers on demand and retire them as soon as the jobs they ran were over. In addition, firms can transform their capital expenses related to the care and feeding of internal clouds environments to a much lower cost operational expense by paying for just the resources they use by using third-party cloud offerings.

However, most technologists agree that cloud architecture falls down when it tries to run latency-sensitive applications. Most technologists agree that latency-sensitive applications function best on dedicated hardware, which avoids various levels of virtualization and typically are co-located with the exchange or liquidity venue. Cloud environments typically are located outside co-location venues due to the high real estate prices co-location vendors charge.

Speaking with Mark Casey and Adam Wray, CEOs of CFN Services and Tier 3 respectively, they believe that they have solved at least half of the problem through a recently announced partnership. If you are not familiar with the two 5-year old vendors, CFN Services delivers hosted co-located market data and trade execution capabilities to 70 global liquidity centers via its Alpha Platform. Tier 3 offers its clients enterprise-grade virtual private cloud environments within its Chicago, New York and Seattle facilities.

February 17, 2012

Start Listening to The Daly Post!

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A major shout out to DirectMarkets' Kevin Lupowitz, who agreed to be my first victim guest on the Daly Post Podcast. In this approximately 30-minute kick-off episode, we discuss how Kevin's firm looks to re-make the follow-on issuing businesses for corporate issuers by adopting an electronic crossing-network paradigm that directly links issuers to institutional investors.