Now that the gold rush of mortgage backed securities trading has led to a severe crash, what do surviving investment banks do with all that hardware (i.e.10 million dollars plus for each institution or more)? Why not become a service marketplace, reduce the risk that comes from directly trading in such securities, and get a cut of the proceeds by being the facilitator of flow? Banks should become flexible and offer their technical expertise as a service.
So why should banks become an infrastructure service provider for hedge funds?:
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Network vendors are starting to provide 10GigE connections, switches and fabric, and given the exponentially increasing demand for bandwidth, enterprises will buy this equipment. Applications that can gobble up the bandwidth will soon follow-there is simply never enough bandwidth. It is becoming clear that those responsible for the applications in datacenters should also be concerned about the proximity of collaborating applications and the number of hops critical transactions take. The importance of this can be better visualized in FEET.
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The current volatility of the financial markets is an example of why understanding demand is so important. The inter-connections across all aspects of our global village, Insurance, Capital Markets, commodity supplies such as energy, forces questions about the characteristics of demand to be answered. Example: How would a financial services company answer "What does a 5 billion share day look like?" How would it affect all of your infrastructure throughout the day.
For an Financial Services company, it is not just about the sheer volume, it is about increased errors rates in the incoming data, increased alerts, increases in overnight processing which already have tight operational windows. It is about increased network latency as temporary servers are brought on line, anywhere there is room to handle the demand.
Even if your company is not financial services, the cascading impact of any large event on transaction traffic and queries, are important for IT executives to consider. In any dynamic market, financial services or otherwise, the demand profile would change as the volume increases. Example- after Thanksgiving, retail stores can expect surges in volume that will last through the New Year, but what is the proportion of browsing to sales, and how does that affect fulfillment. With the increase in streaming media as a key attractor for potential buyers, what is the effect on the network, storage and compute? How does meeting the needs of the client facing systems affect the resources required for back end and fulfillment systems? How does severe weather affect a whole range of companies? The needs could change inter-day, (heavy client facing demand during the day and heavy fulfillment and inventory replacement at night).
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A complex system such as an enterprise network is subjected to many kinds of stresses from a large variety of business applications that have different demand profiles. Dig deeper into any large network and you will see that one solution doesn't solve all problems. Pockets of point solutions are installed to solve problems as they arise, this is rarely efficient in a large network. The big question for IT is whether it is possible to be forward thinking when deploying these solutions through the use of network ensembles.
What is a network ensemble? A network ensemble is an integrated collection of services and functions that are engineered to work together to optimize specific behavior.
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Virtualization has many advocates and is the latest IT bandwagon rallying cry. The approaches to virtualization have taken two distinct paths. The supply side path is usually undertaken by IT operations in an attempt to mask hardware differences and minimize complexity; this approach does not go far enough. The other path involves a business demand driven approach. The demand driven approach needs to be taken to ensure that virtualization is executed in a strategic manner.
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This metaphor about executives seeing all the data but not being able to use it is a very old battle cry in IT. Data comes in faster than ever, has greater density every year and the crisis only deepens. As stated in a previous blog,the network is the nervous system of the enterprise, and as such it must help the stimuli flow. Everyone uses the network to pass information, so what’s the problem? Congestion, priority conflict, bad timing such as sending gigabyte files over the network during regular business hours, and the endless copying of the same data set, so that “I can be in control of my own destiny”.
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I have gotten some responses to the first two blogs, and the most compelling so far has been “What if your conscious (the top manager) doesn’t understand, is lazy, thinks it is too costly or too much work, etc? This is a good article but, I think, it takes for granted that someone wants really manage the change and sees the benefits”. This person is absolutely correct. What is a beleaguered visionary, with no high level decision-making powers to do?
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If the network is like the human body (and it is), the question now becomes how to embrace the inevitable forces of change and harness the possibility and power of co-evolution. There are critical questions to ask related to the mechanics of change that drive co-evolution:
As the business evolves, so must the network which supports all of the applications used to run the business. It is co-evolution: The change in a business' needs drive the demand and any increased network capability enhances the responsiveness of the business, often driving further change. The burning question for most businesses is whether this cyclic behavior has become a consciously observed pattern, or is just subject to the "whims of forces beyond any control." To understand how we can harness and embrace this change, it would help to see the results of co-evolution in other networks. If we explore the use of networks in the human body, what can we derive as lessons learned?
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Tony Bishop is CEO, Adaptivity. He'd previously served as SVP and chief architect of Wachovia's Corporate Investment Banking Technology Group, where his team earned numerous awards for its SOA and utility computing infrastructure. Tony has 19 years' experience and is the recipient of 40 under 40 Most Innovative IT Leaders, Premier 100 IT Leaders as selected (by ComputerWorld in 2007) and a member of Wall Street Gold Book 2007.
Sheppard Narkier is chief scientist and co-founder of Adaptivity. Prior to that, he was head of software portfolio management and IT governance for the Wachovia Corporate Investment Banking Technology Group. Sheppard has more than 29 years of experience in the IT industry. He focuses on cost-effective IT systems and is an acknowleged expert at reusable components (frameworks, programs, architecture), the realtime enterprise, SOAs, messaging and legacy system integration.
Intelligent Network Computing archive.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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