Securities Industry News Clips from 2003

Archipelago: Tech Contrarian
At a time when other Wall Street firms are replacing expensive proprietary servers with cheap Wintel or Linux boxes, Archipelago is bucking the trend.
Securities Industry News Feature (December 2003)

EAI Gains Traction: Vendors offer plug-and-play integration solutions
About a year ago, the Royal Bank of Canada began to hear the same demands from different divisions within the bank. But instead of building dozens of one-off solutions, the bank decided to go with an enterprisewide standard platform.
Securities Industry News Feature (November 2003)

Communicator Offers Public IM Connections
In a sign that instant messaging interoperability is becoming ever more important to Wall Street users, Communicator's new Hub Connex product offers connections to public IM networks from AOL, Yahoo! and MSN.
Securities Industry News Feature (November 2003)

On Afghanistan's To-Do List, Market Development Remains Missing Issue
I was in Afghanistan almost a decade ago, just before the Taliban came to power. I entered it from Tajikistan, a nearby former Soviet republic. Going to Tajikistan was like stepping back 20 years to a time of bad Soviet clothing, drab Soviet architecture and ugly cars. Walking across the border into Afghanistan felt like stepping back a thousand years.
Securities Industry News Feature (November 2003)

New Storage Tech Reducing Need for Tape, Optical
After punch cards, tape storage might be the most inconvenient way to keep data around. But new technology, including networked storage, is finally making disk storage competitive, especially when the management costs are factored in. And when it comes to compliance, disks win hands down.
Securities Industry News Feature (November 2003)

IM Key Part of Changing Technology at Stifel Nicolaus
Lee Blackmore, director of information technology at St. Louis-based broker-dealer Stifel Nicolaus, recently sat down with Securities Industry News Technology Correspondent Maria Trombly.
Securities Industry News Feature (October 2003)

IM Providers Race to Address Identity Problem
As the instant messaging offerings of various vendors start to show signs of becoming more interoperable, Wall Street users have an important role to play. They need to ensure that the system that eventually develops allows for identity authentication.
Securities Industry News Feature (October 2003)

HP Protects Linux Users; Will Other Vendors Follow?
Hewlett-Packard's announcement last week that it will indemnify Linux users against potential legal liabilities, starting Oct. 1, represents a major move that will aid Street firms in their migration to Linux and pressure other vendors to match HP.
Securities Industry News Feature (September 2003)

Wall Street Still Wary of Year-Old 10-Gig Ethernet
Last summer, when 10-gigabit Ethernet was first approved, it was an untried and expensive networking technology. Today, the price has dropped to half of what it was then. But many Wall Street firms are still not biting.
Securities Industry News Feature (September 2003)

A Brief History of Ethernet and Its Networking Role
Ethernet is a communication method for computer networks that was first invented by Bob Metcalfe in the late 1970s.
Securities Industry News Feature (September 2003)

New Regulations, Technology Move Russian Mart Forward
It's been five years since the disastrous crash of 1998, and the Russian stock market-once dominated by a small circle of investors-has taken off.
Securities Industry News Feature (September 2003)

Lawsuit Rings Open-Source Bells But Linux Plans Remain
This past spring, a little company based in Utah sued IBM, claiming that it owned the rights to some of the underlying code now found in Linux. And it wanted IBM to pony up $3 billion in damages -- and all end-users to start paying licensing fees.
Securities Industry News Feature (August 2003)
Content Management: Taming the Info Flood
It used to be that computers stored neatly categorized information, such as names and addresses, in nice searchable records. Everything else went into filing cabinets. But all the stuff in the filing cabinets is starting to creep into the computers as well. Today, more than 80 percent of all information stored electronically is unstructured information. And the amount of data that's going digital is increasing at a rate of 80 to 100 percent a year.
Securities Industry News Feature (August 2003)

More Than Just a Database
A good ECM system will have the following features, said Bruce Silver of Bruce Silver Associates, a content and process management advisory firm.
Securities Industry News Sidebar (August 2003)

EMC Plugs Product Hole With Legato
EMC Corp.'s acquisition of Legato Systems, announced last week, means that EMC will now be able to offer a more comprehensive range of storage-related products of particular interest to securities firms-including in the area of e-mail archiving.
Securities Industry News News (July 2003)

U.S. government expels legitimate reporters
In May, nine legitimate journalists were stopped while trying to enter a country. They were repeatedly questioned, fingerprinted, searched, handcuffed and held overnight in cells. Then they were deported to their countries of origin without being given a chance to appeal the decision, or even to apply for a temporary visa on the spot. The country? The United States. The reason the journalists were here? To cover a video game conference.
Quill Subscription Required (July 2003)

Web Portals Expand to Include Functional Content
When Internet portals first came on the scene in 1999, Wall Street firms immediately saw how they could be useful-but it wasn't until recently that firms began putting the technology into practice. UBS PaineWebber has been experimenting with portals, as has Merrill Lynch, Oppenheimer Funds and other Wall Street firms.
Securities Industry News Feature (July 2003)

Siac Adds Clients to SFTI Network; 35 Users Live
The Securities Industry Automation Corp. announced last Thursday that it has signed up more than 100 customers for its new, secure optical network. Some 35 firms are already connected to SFTI, Siac said. By 2004, 1,000 firms are expected to have switched over.
Securities Industry News Feature (June 2003)

IM: Meeting Regulatory, Tech and Security Concerns
Last Tuesday, Securities Industry News brought together a group of instant messaging experts with about 200 members of the financial community for a Web seminar on IM on Wall Street. Although there was a question and answer period at the conclusion of the seminar, there wasn't enough time to answer all of the questions posed by the audience members. Some of these questions and answers were excerpted below by Maria Trombly
Securities Industry News Feature (June 2003)

Challenges Remain for Wireless Service
Those who took a break from the Securities Industry Association conference in New York City last week to jog across town to the other tech conference, CeBIT America, got a chance to play with some nifty new gadgets-and heard warnings that wireless technology, although stirring a buzz again, may not quite be ready for prime time.At least, not in the securities industry.
Securities Industry News Feature (June 2003)

Street Makes Forays Into Utility Computing
The promise of utility computing is that computer power could be delivered as easily as electricity. You get exactly as much as you need, you only pay for what you use, and, except for hot summer days in California, there's always more available if you need it.
Securities Industry News Feature (June 2003)

Street Makes Forays Into Utility Computing
The promise of utility computing is that computer power could be delivered as easily as electricity. You get exactly as much as you need, you only pay for what you use, and, except for hot summer days in California, there's always more available if you need it.
Securities Industry News Feature (June 2003)

Beyond Linux: Focusing on the future of open source
It's every technology vendor's nightmare: a proprietary moneymaking technology is replaced by a free alternative built by a global army of volunteers working in their spare time, destroying the business model overnight. Of course, this is also the dream of every technology user who's tired of paying too much for unmodifiable code and being locked into one particular platform. Wall Street IT departments are no exception. In fact, with the recent wave of budget cutbacks and a renewed emphasis on efficiency, open source is starting to look really good.
Securities Industry News (June 9, 2003)

Sun Aims New Low-Cost Strategy at Street Firms
Sun Microsystems' permanent shift to a low-cost strategy announced last week was designed in part to appeal to Wall Street firms that have a great deal of money and expertise invested in Sun's Solaris unix operating system-but want to move to a lower-cost platform. Instead of focusing on running a proprietary operating system on proprietary hardware, Sun will now offer Solaris on Intel machines, Sun Linux on Intel machines, and Red Hat Linux on Intel machines-at prices up to 50-percent cheaper than those of Dell, HP and IBM. Previously, the Solaris operating system was not widely available on the x86 Intel microprocessor.
Securities Industry News (May 26, 2003)

Basel II May Impact Securities Biz More Than Expected
The Basel II accord-which would require that financial services firms set aside capital reserves to ensure against credit and operational risk-is likely to extend to securities firms as well as to banks, TowerGroup analysts said last week. The third draft of the Basel II accord was released on Tuesday by the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. There will be a comment period through July 31, and the final accord is due to be completed by the fourth quarter. The recommendations are slated to go into effect at the end of 2006.
Securities Industry News (May 5, 2003)

Help Abounds For Users
All the major consulting firms have invested in the new technology, training programmers, setting up dedicated development centers, and forging ties with technology vendors. The goal? To become attractive to Wall Street firms moving to a services-based architecture. Securities Industry News talked to a number of consulting companies and asked what advice they have to offer Wall Street firms looking to deploy Web services. Here are some of their suggestions.
Securities Industry News (May 5, 2003)

Hand-Helds Dominate Big Board's Trading Floor
Until last fall, traders who wanted to place complex orders with the specialists on the New York Stock Exchange floor had to manually write down the information and hand over little pieces of paper-even traders who had long switched over to hand-held wireless devices. "There are often times a customer would leave an order away from the market, orders with limits, that we'd have to take off the hand-held and put on a paper order," said Robert McCooey Jr., president and CEO at The Griswold Co., based in New York City. "It was too time consuming, and too burdensome, especially in a decimal environment."
Securities Industry News (May 5, 2003)

CBOE Also Embracing New Mobile Technology
The NYSE isn't alone in using hand-helds on the trading floor. At the Chicago Board Options Exchange, 97 percent of trades come from the hand-helds, according to spokesman Gary Compton. Of those devices, 85 percent are proprietary models, brought in by the traders themselves.
Securities Industry News (May 5, 2003)

Wonders of Soap: A Dream for Users, Nightmare for Vendors
Everybody and his brother has a different definition of Web services, but it's really very simple: Web services are built with Soap (Simple Object Access Protocol). If it ain't got Soap, it's not a Web service.
Securities Industry News Feature (May 2003)

As Standards Evolve, Platforms Improve
This year, Microsoft, IBM, BEA and Sun Microsystems are expanding on their basic Web services development frameworks to offer support for the latest security and transaction protocols, improve Web services coordination, and add more management tools.
Securities Industry News Feature (May 2003)

Street's Embrace of Intel, Windows, Linux Boosts Dell
Dell's inexpensive but reliable workstations and laptop computers have always appealed to Wall Street firms, but with the recent interest in Intel, Windows and Linux, grid computing, and, of course, saving money, firms are turning to Dell servers as well.
Securities Industry News Feature (Apr. 2003)

Wall Street Firms Cope With Surge in IM Traffic
According to estimates from Boston-based Yankee Group, there are currently more than 25 million business users of IM in the United States, most of them so-called "stealth IMers," using public IM services on an informal basis without IT approval.
Securities Industry News Feature (Mar. 2003)

IM Technology a Boon for Customer Service
Instant messaging technology has proven to be a new way for firms to reach out and touch their customers.
Securities Industry News Feature (Mar. 2003)

Instant Messaging Standards: Keeping It Simple
It's an instant messaging case of extremes. While the free-swinging AOL IM users are sending unencrypted messages willy-nilly across the public Internet, others are locked behind virtual stockades, using enterprise-based or community-based IM solutions that only allow them to talk to other employees. Someday, all this confusion will go away and the world will have standards-based instant messaging, so that a user of any given system will be able to send messages to the users of any other system.
Securities Industry News Feature (Mar. 2003)

Hello, HAL: Computer Systems That Fix Themselves
When I first heard that some computer vendors were working on "self-healing" systems, my first thought was: Where do I sign up?
Securities Industry News Feature (March 3, 2003)

The Four Stages of Autonomic Computing
Before a system can manage itself, it has to know what's out there. A virtual map of the computer system needs to be created, with accurate and up-to-date information about hardware and software configurations.
Securities Industry News (March 3, 2003)

Is Linux technology set to Elbow Unix off Wall Street?
In a remarkable development, a free platform put together by volunteers working in their spare time, has become the operating system of choice for many Wall Street firms. Morgan Stanley is one of them.
Securities Industry News Feature (Feb. 2003)

Firms Turn to Internet Telephony for Flexibility, BCP
All the interviews for this article were conducted using an Internet telephone. But before you start to feel sorry for the folks I talked to, you should know that there was no echo, no lag, no dropped calls and no problems with sound quality. In fact, the only way to tell that I was on an Internet phone is the absence of long distance charges.
Securities Industry News Feature (Jan. 2003)

Fujitsu High-End Servers to Incorporate Intel, Linux
Linux got a big boost last Friday when Fujitsu Ltd., the world's fifth-largest server vendor based in Tokyo, announced jointly with Intel that it will begin moving into new territory-high-end servers based on Intel processors, running either on the open operating system or Windows. A main licensee of Sun Microsystems' Sparc processor and Solaris' Unix-based operating system, Fujitsu produces high-end servers for back-office applications in Japan and Western Europe, though the firm also has some Wall Street customers.
Securities Industry News (January 27, 2003)

Web Services: Set for Prime time
Wall Street firms are already enjoying the benefits of Web services for internal integration, but a lack of security standards has hindered use outside corporate firewalls. That situation will start to change in 2003 as standards-setting bodies are expected to agree on methods to ensure that Web services are safe and secure. A standards-based way to connect disparate applications, Web services offer lower costs and quicker deployment than other integration mechanisms.
Securities Industry News (January 6, 2003)