Joe Morrison and I just had an article published in Computer Weekly that summarizes how business customers can play a role in IT teams delivering better software more frequently and reliably. Read the article at Lab49 here, or online here.

The fifth installment of the CEP podcast series has been posted here and on the Lab49 website. This is the third and final part of the interview I did with Daniel Chait of Lab49 and Brad Bailey of the Aite Group.

All of these CEP podcasts and other audio/video sessions we have recorded can be found on the Lab49 website at: http://www.lab49.com/insidethelab/audiovideo

The fourth installment of the CEP Podcast series has been posted here. This podcast is the second part of the interview I conducted with Brad Bailey of the Aite Group and Daniel Chait of Lab49. In this part we are continuing to discuss the challenges facing capital markets firms and how CEP provides an opportunity to manage these market challenges in new ways.

All of these CEP episodes, and other  podcasts we have done can be found at http://www.lab49.com/insidethelab/audiovideo

Daniel finished up his coverage of Mix08 in Las Vegas last week by posting some other podcasts:

• Guy Kawasaki - Managing Director at Garage Technology Ventures - Technology evangelist, entrepreneur, Apple Fellow, author of over eight books and frequent technology consultant, Guy shared his thoughts with Daniel about RSS feeds and how competition in software companies has moved beyond operating systems.
• Eric Zocher - Microsoft’s General Manager for Design Tools - Eric discussed with Daniel what makes Microsoft’s Expression such a great tool; his thoughts on Microsoft’s importance to the web, and how a user can adapt to Expression when coming from backgrounds with other suites.
• Robert Scoble - tech-head, super-blogger of Scobleizer fame and the host of two new online shows at Fast Company - Robert discusses Microsoft’s relevance on the internet, quick and dirty vlogging procedures, and how aesthetics now play a part in what hardware people choose.

The third installment of the CEP Podcast series has been posted here. This podcast is the first part of the interview I conducted with Brad Bailey of the Aite Group and Daniel Chait of Lab49. In the interview we discussed many of the market, client and technology trends that are driving the CEP marketplace. The second and third parts of the interview will be posted in the next week or two.

Lab49’s Daniel Chait has been busy at Mix08 in Las Vegas checking out the latest from Microsoft. In conjunction with Zoom In Online, he is blogging his observations and has posted a number of interviews he has recorded (so far) with Christian Schorman (Director of Program Management for Microsoft Expression), Anson Tsao (Senior Program Manager for WPF), Bernardo Castilho, (Chief Technology Officer of ComponentOne).

The second part of the Lab49 CEP podcast Daniel Chait and I recorded is now available, here

In the next podcast to be published (already recorded), I will be discussing with Brad Bailey (ex-Aite Group analyst) some of the industry and client trends he has found through his research on CEP. Daniel also pitched in as a technical expert.

Daniel Chait and I will be hosting a series of podcasts discussing Complex Event Processing (CEP) in Capital Markets. The first podcast is a general discussion on trends leading to the demand for CEP, some of the primary use cases and some discussion on what to look for in a CEP vendor. It has been split into two parts: Part One is here. The series is managed by VoicesInBusiness and sponsored by BEA.

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

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).

Lab49’s Daniel Chait provides SDTimes’ editor-in-chief David Rubinstein with his views on CEP, HPC, multi-core processing, WPF/Flex, etc, here.  Nice article, David.

Lab49’s Daniel Chait gets some great coverage on the Microsoft’s Developer & Evangelism Platform - Financial Services blog: Building up to the Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference - The Chait Chat

The last few months and weeks have been a bit mad with a host of new client projects coming online, and a tidal wave of marketing activities.

On the project front, and despite some dodgy market conditions, we have been continuing to see (and have started) some interesting projects around automated trading: from market simulation environments to real-time pricing to risk management systems. We have also seen more projects on the buy-side where the level of innovation and adoption of the latest technologies is still impressive. In advanced visualization (specifically, WPF/Silverlight), we are starting to see interest across various trading businesses which is very promising going forward. We also continue to be involved in quite a few projects involving grid computing, distributed cache, etc.

On the marketing front, we have been busy publishing new articles, contributed to a number of features in various industry publications and are currently in the process of writing some thought leadership pieces for technology and finance publications. We have also been doing some great sales & marketing activities with some of our technology partners around, including working on some new client opportunities and developing some demos leveraging WPF and CEP platforms. (We will also be starting to talk a bit more openly about our various partnerships)

What’s great about the recent flurry of project and marketing activity has been the balance across high performance computing (grid, cache, etc), Java (J2EE, Spring, opensource), Microsoft (WPF, Silverlight) and other technologies (messaging, market data, visualization, etc), which really helps to show Lab49’s depth and breadth across the technology space. Some highlights from the last few months include:

• A cool new Lab49 WPF Contest to find the best WPF developers in finance - with various sponsors contributing over $15,000 in prizes.
• Luke wrote a special feature”Computation on Demand” for GridToday which discusses the world of virtualization, with specific references to Amazon’s EC2.
• Daniel has been pretty active in giving interviews across the board, and extremely involved in various Microsoft activities, including the new Financial Industry Council, including being a guest on their 2nd podcast
• Matt started his (hopefully regular) column for Dr. Dobb’s: “WPF and the need to visualize CEP/ESP“, with more already in the works.
• Not to be outdone (!), Marc also wrote a great article for GridToday entitled, “Grid in Financial Services: Past, Present and Future“

Lots more news, articles, features, partner updates, etc in the pipeline that I will post as they happen..

Lab49 has been working with BEA on their new Weblogic Event Server (WLEVS) product in the complex event processing space. As part of this effort, we have been building a demo of how one could automatically reprice a portfolio of fixed income instruments against streaming market data. In addition to WLEVS, we used Quantlib’s C++ libraries and Lab49’s own market data simulator, with the front end built in WPF.

A couple of us from Lab49 attended the BEA World Conference in San Francisco last week and I presented the demo as part of the “Introduction to Event Server” session.

Click on the image below to view a screencast of the demo .. (this is a .wmv version for the moment..)

We were able to run the demo pricing 400 bonds/sec, with 4.6ms latency, on an Intel Quad processor - the folks at Shuttle helped us with their latest snazzy new XPC box. We also developed a cool WPF visualization of the Event Processing Network where we can automatically generate XAML from the underlying EPN configuration which we then data-bind to the event server’s performance monitoring meta-data.

I will put the demo and more information on the Lab49 website, and hopefully we will get it onto BEA’s Dev2Dev portal soon…

I was reading ConfusedOfCulcutta the other day who had blogged about Cluetrain and this geek version of the 95 Theses. The Cluetrain Manifesto has some interesting ideas, witty observations and a very healthy amount of rant against the establishment (one of the authors created RageBoy). But it is not for everyone, example here.

Whatever your take, there were some interesting anecdotes and points in Cluetrain that have some relevance from a social networking and collaboration perspective in financial services, and specifically technology in FS. The truth is that our industry is really not that big in terms of the network of people within it, and therefore the relationships we have and cultivate are critical to building a successful business. Close relationships are built on trust and a record of delivery. Once you have them, you have to protect and nurture them. If you lose them, game over. 

One of the main themes in Cluetrain is that of the markets being conversations. I do agree with this, however I think that conversations and the human/social aspects are the fuel that drives the markets and instills a sense of belonging and community — but from a business perspective you also need to have a product or service that has value, is differentiated and can be delivered well.

Another thing they talk about is the use of the human voice over mass-marketing and corporate messaging. This, I totally agree with. None of the people we work for, nor those we would like to work for, want to hear the sales-pitch and marketing fluff. They want to hear what you do, how you do it, as well as your view and opinion. They want to understand and relate to you as a person, and as a proxy for the other people in your organization. They are humans too and will make judgements, have emotions, opinions and sensitivities. Ramming some corporate marketing-speak down their throats is not what they are looking for -  especially when the conversation is technical. A more honest, open and candid approach has always worked better for me when talking to clients, partners, journalists, analysts and other market players. Respect and trust are earned, not bought. In the (partial) defense of marketing though (which gets a good old kicking by Cluetrain), I do believe that it can add value in places such as helping to formulate valuable strategic partnerships (yes, via conversations!) across the market to create interesting service oferings, or providing a support function to both the sales and engineering organizations. Marketing can also help to foster internal communications as well as exposing the company’s real people to the outside world (via blogs, for example).

There is a lot of discussion about an employee-led organization versus the command and control modus operandi. This is where I think some balance is needed. First and foremost, I believe that maximizing transparency to everyone in the organization is important to fostering an open and respectful environment in the workplace. This has to be opened up across all functions (engineering, projects, marketing, sales, recruiting, etc) so people can really get to see what everyone is doing, how they are doing it, and question why they are doing it at all!  Today’s social software is a key aspect that extends much of what is said in Cluetrain (specific elements of which, such as wikis and blogs etc, were missed in Cluetrain as it was written in the late ’90s). This social networking will help to foster open communication, feedback and innovation within the company and even (but not always!) with clients. It is nice to see some companies such as Dresdner adopting social networking as a corporate policy (they use Socialtext for their wiki).

[Sidenote: Open source communities are a great example of where borderless collaboration rely on natural human dynamics to innovate and develop technologies that we can all benefit from. It is nice to see (finally) that some financial services institutions are relatively wholesale in acknlowledging that these tools & frameworks (Spring and Hibernate being obvious examples) can and should be leveraged, but maybe that is because a) the maturity of the technology has progressed and its adoption has "crossed the chasm"  and/or b) the cost-structure outweighs their natural risk adversity !!!]

Getting back to employee-driven organizations, where people want to get involved in many aspects of the company they should be encouraged (within reason). Where people do not want to broaden their role or responsibilities, that’s cool with me as well. That said, I think there are some things that do require a certain amount of “control” albeit with the appropriate amount of feedback and insight from the ranks. Things like finance, legal, HR and certain aspects of sales do require a certain amount of sensitivity and confidentiality. For me, the most important thing is to leverage people for what they are good at and to support what they would like to do. Imposing articifial barriers, filters and restraints is counterproductive to both innovation, as well as delivery of the company’s services. We want leadership over management !!

From a project delivery perspective, I have always subscribed to some of the same human/social aspects of agile development. Self-organizing teams that have been given the reigns to get the delivery done, but supported by a “facilitaor / impediment remover”, aka the Scrum Master in Scrum, demonstrate how well the theory can play out in practice — when executed properly. Over several iterations, the language the team speaks, the dynamics, the comradery and their productivity simply improve in orders of magnitude. Some of this is due to improving their understanding of the business or technical domain and the use of certain solid engineering practices (continuous build & integration, refactoring, code reviews, etc). But I think most of it is down to the social and interpersonal dynamics that come from the close collaboration with end-users, regular feedback, daily stand-ups, and team retrospectives. As I also previously mentioned, wikis are brilliant in supporting iterative development.

At the end of the day, if you provide a collaborative, challenging and fun workplace for your people, they will help you communicate with and deliver for your clients and their people. I am not suggesting that it easily results in the ultimate, most heavenly blissful corporate paradise that some would have us subscribe to, but it would certainly make our life (at work) that much more rewarding and certainly a lot more fun….