Securities Industry News Clips from 2004

Tech Offshoring Off the Beaten Path
In the pursuit of the international offshoring dollar, India looms largest, followed by Western Europe. Other countries barely show up on the radar screen. But the global strategic picture is gradually beginning to shift.
Securities Industry News Feature (September 2004)

Open Source on the Desktop Faces Hurdles
Although open source, in the form of Linux, Apache, MySQL and other applications, has become increasingly popular on Wall Street servers, open-source applications still face almost insurmountable hurdles when it comes to the desktops.
Securities Industry News Feature (June 2004)

Jumping Right In, Still Holding Back
Wall Street firms have been bullish on Linux the past couple of years, moving an increasing number of applications over to the low-cost, easily customizable open-source operating system.
Securities Industry News Feature (June 2004)

Software Licenses Amid Grid
"Software licensing will have to change because at the moment, it just doesn't support the grid model," said Steve Dunton, CTO of British firm Techtonic Ltd. "Using any of the standard licensing systems, you have to pay for everything based on where you have it installed, which is no use at all for grids."
Securities Industry News Feature (June 2004)

Evolving Standards May Boost Wireless
Wireless networking, though easy to set up and appealing to many users, still poses security risks for Wall Street companies. In the near future, however, as wireless security standards mature, that situation may change.
Securities Industry News Feature (June 2004)

Serving Up Spim
When the Chicago Stock Exchange was searching for a secure way to provide instant messaging to the brokerage members clamoring for it, one of executives' main concerns was combating a growing plague: Spim (or Spam over Instant Messaging).
Securities Industry News Feature (June 2004)

Outsourcing: Tech Management Headaches
For some firms, using technology is like using an elevator. Without it, business stops. But do you really want to know how all the pulleys and motors work?
Securities Industry News Feature (June 2004)

Is Your Firm Socially Networked? Chances Are, It Will Be Soon
I joined a social network last week. Many of my friends and colleagues were already members, happily referring work to each other, giving advice and otherwise helping one another prosper.
Securities Industry News Feature (June 2004)

How the Street Learned to Love IM
From the smallest to the largest firms, instant messaging has become a must-have communications medium on Wall Street. And there's no stopping it, as much as some wish they could find a way.
Securities Industry News Feature (June 2004)

China Starting to Look Good for Outsourcing
Last fall, Boston-based Bain Capital Ventures needed a database to track its investments. It was a job just right for one of Bain's portfolio companies, E5 Systems.
Securities Industry News Feature (May 2004)

Web Services: A Dream Deferred
At first glance, Web services looked tailor-made for straight-through processing. The set of open standards was poised to wipe all previous proprietary communications methods right off the map. That still might happen, some day. But today, Web services are mostly limited to internal integration projects.
Securities Industry News Feature (May 2004)

Virtual Tape Coming of Age
It looks like tape storage to your computer system but costs twice as much and can't be put in a box and stored away, or shipped somewhere overnight. But virtual tape--otherwise known as disk libraries--has finally hit the big time, with a new product from storage goliath EMC Corp.
Securities Industry News Feature (April 2004)

Microsoft Swift Package Final
Last week, Microsoft announced the full availability of the BizTalk Accelerator for Swift after some delays. The product, which runs on the BizTalk server, is billed as a way to cut costs and speed implementation times for Swift integration for small, medium and large brokerage firms.
Securities Industry News Feature (April 2004)

Utility Computing Still to Come
Many people like the idea of utility computing. Companies shouldn't have to manage their computer hardware, the same way that they generally don't need to run their own coal-burning power plants or wind farms.
Securities Industry News Feature (March 2004)

Grids Promise to Move Beyond Analytics
Pete Johnson has seen grids come a long way over the past few years. They've been used for space exploration and to map the human genome. Biotech companies use them for designing drugs, for running experiments with massive amounts of data and for handling databases that organize complex images, not just sets of data points.
Securities Industry News Feature (March 2004)

IM Front Shifts Beyond the Office
Two years ago, traders at BNY Brokerage, a unit of the BNY Securities Group, started asking for instant messaging on their desktops. It was a request difficult to ignore, since it was the customers themselves who were ultimately behind it.
Securities Industry News Feature (March 2004)

Know Your Customer's Voice
At Barclays Capital, most customers communicate with the investment bank by telephone, and the familiar sound of a customer's voice is a basic line of defense against an illegitimate transaction. But there are signs that more sophisticated voice recognition techniques than the human ear may some day be the norm for the industry.
Securities Industry News Feature (March 2004)

IMlogic Takes Next Step in IM Integration
Instant messaging is fine, but wouldn't it be nice if all the different IM platforms could talk to each other, and IM was more closely integrated with the other applications you use every day?
Securities Industry News News (February 2004)

Citi Rides Outsourcing Wave
Keeping track of paperwork for qualified institutional buyers (QIBs) is often a nightmare for broker-dealers--but that could be changing.
Securities Industry News News (February 2004)

New Application Keeps Out Trojan Horses, Viruses
Raymond James & Associates has a problem. Employees, independent advisers and customers are all logging in from insecure machines at home, so when family members download free content off the Internet, hidden nasty software may be attached. these Trojan horses run in the background, watching everything the user types, everywhere the user goes. That includes their brokerage account activity.
Securities Industry News Feature (February 2004)

Mission: Iraq for Volunteers
How do you get high-powered Wall Street executives to go to struggling countries to share their expertise? Try offering them no money.
Securities Industry News Feature (February 2004)

Content Management Tools Grow to Embrace Work Flow
Boston Capital Corp. last year was busy moving its files out of paper boxes and into electronic form. It was a huge undertaking, with off-site storage rooms housing boxes and boxes of information, involving millions of pages of documents each quarter.
Securities Industry News Feature (February 2004)

Red Hat Guarantee a Boost to Linux Users
Red Hat's announcement last month that it would guarantee that its Linux distribution was free of copyright problems--and that it would immediately correct any such problems that might arise--should help allay the concerns of its many Wall Street customers, experts say.
Securities Industry News News (February 2004)

Filling Inboxes: Viruses, Spam, Phishing Scams
There are two kinds of e-mail problems brokerages will face in 2004. There are the ones with known, though not perfect, solutions--spam, viruses, those annoying misspelled e-mails to customers that ask for their account information.But recently, a new kind of spoofing attack has shown up, and there's no clear way to protect against it--yet.
Securities Industry News Feature (February 2004)

Buddying Up with IM Lists
Some days, I wish my phone worked the same as my instant messaging buddy list. In IM, I can see at a glance who's around and who's not, who's away from his computer and who's too busy to talk. All I have to do to chat with someone is click on his name.
Securities Industry News Feature (February 2004)

New Data Transformation Model Gains Momentum
A tangled mess is what we have now when it comes to transforming data from one standard to another. The hub-and-spoke model is the promise of ontology-based transformations, also known as vocabulary management.
Securities Industry News Feature (January 2004)