Interesting perspective from the Economist on the $7.2bn loss by a rogue trader at Societe Generale.

At Lab49, we finished a very strong year with a flurry of client and marketing activity. On the client side, we have seen a remarkable uptick in demand from the buy-side (hedge funds) and exchanges. This is in addition to our traditional tier-one sell-side client base.

Complex Event Processing was a big growth area for us (as was large scale computing and WPF), with us continuing to build relationships with the main vendors in the space. Many of these companies have brought us into client opportunities, wanted us to build demos specific to financial services’ front offices, and engaged us in various marketing-related activities. This month we launched a whitepaper with BEA based on our fixed income CEP demo using the BEA Weblogic Event Server (of course, that was not the tipping point for Oracle to buy BEA 2 days later ). Recently, Daniel Chait wrote a nice article for Aleri on the practicalities of selecting a CEP vendor. Watch this space for a series of podcasts that I will be hosting with Daniel that will discuss CEP in capital markets with various people from the industry.

In November, a few of us did some brainstorming on some of the cool technologies and IT trends that we think emerge or gain traction in 2008. When we ran these by a number of the horizontal and fintech press, we got some very positive traction, resulting in a whole series of articles, features and podcats we will be writing or contributing to over the next few weeks/months. Network World did a podcast on some of these trends with Daniel during their “Predictions Week”.

Separately, Joe was also interviewed in an article discussing SOAP vs REST

Just announced an hour ago, for $8.5billion. Will now be interesting to see what the Weblogic product strategy looks like with respect to providing distributed cache integration, ie when will Coherence be part of the stack ?

For $200m cash. Looks like the Wombat messaging platform will be integrated with NYSE’s TransactTools. NYSE press release here, Securities Industry News here.

Finally, the whitepaper we have been writing with BEA and Intel on how the BEA Weblogic Event Server can be leveraged in the front office has been published here and on the Lab49 website. The paper outlines general trends in the CEP market; use cases for the application of CEP; and a reference architecture. This work is based on the fixed income demo Lab49 built with BEA which focused specifically on analytics integration and performance (as well as a cool WPF visualization).

Joel On Software has this post on “How walkable is your neighborhood?” Out of 100, Microsoft’s campus gets 31, Googleplex gets 34, Joel’s company gets 98.

But Lab49, gets 100 out of 100……