Low-Latency.com

It’s been a while I know, but this blogging business just keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the list. My thanks then to “Uncle” Tom Groenfeldt for alerting me on his blog to the recent departure from Sun Microsystems of Larry Scott, where he was vice president for financial services. Larry is going somewhere, though he’s not telling, at least not yet. But his departure jogged my memory to some offline conversations I’ve been having of late, not least during the Linux on Wall Street conference that I chaired the other week.

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Please excuse the headline … I wanted to be cute and grab some attention. When it comes to market data rates, OPRA - the Options Price Reporting Authority - makes the headlines that low latency vendors (and industry analysts) love to cite - because the numbers are so frighteningly big. The reality, though, is a bit different.
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There was quite a bit of M&A activity last week. Oracle and BEA for $8.5 billion (we’ll have to see whether that’s good news for BEA’s Weblogic Event Server), Sun Microsystems and MySQL for a billion, and NYSE-Euronext snapping up Wombat Financial Software for $200 million.
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You’d have thought that several months after we started this website that we’d know what we’re about. I guess we kinda thought the world out there had already decided what is low latency, and what is not. But I guess life isn’t that straightforward.
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Oracle caused a bit of excitement at the end of last week when it made an unsolicited bid for BEA Systems. BEA’s rejected it of course, saying it undervalues the company. All standard procedure. We’ll see what Oracle’s next move is. But if the transaction does happen, it will bring together some useful technologies that have merit in the world of low latency.
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Last month, Low-Latency.com ran an online poll asking whether Microsoft or Sun Microsystems was better at offering low latency solutions. The result: 30 percent went with Sun, seven percent with Microsoft. But the majority - 63 percent - reckoned neither company is a player in this space.
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If you’ve been in the industry as long as I’ve been here, then you too probably are aware that many new hot concepts have a familiar, and dated, ring to them. I was at a WFIC session on direct feeds last week when a panelist from JP Morgan Chase commented that direct feeds caused him “the most pain, sometimes for seemingly little gain.” That took me back …
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I am here in the lovely town of Newport, RI for this year’s World Financial Information Congress. Very much enjoying my stay at the quaint and historic Jail House Inn, just a few minutes walk across the causeway to where the conference is taking place - a Hyatt that looks much like a parking garage from a distance.
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I’ve been absent from the blogosphere for a little while. It’s been the silly season and it seemed a good time to take a break. But with my annual Pimm’s party, Labor Day and the Office 2.0 conference behind me, I reckoned it was time to start writing again.
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In the world of low latency, it seems that benchmarks are headline news. Having readily available figures showing xxx microseconds and yyy hundreds of thousands of updates per second is a pretty sure way to get some press coverage for one’s product. Indeed, I find myself asking of vendors who are pushing their new datafeed handler, or complex event processing engine, “So, got any benchmarks for it?”
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