This article originally appeared in Securities Industry News.
By Maria Trombly
As packets of information travel from, say, New York to Tokyo and London, a company can lose money because the data reaches its offices at different times. That, say GigaSpaces Technologies and Solace Systems, is the problem they are seeking to address with jointly developed messaging [...]

This article originally appeared in Securities Industry News.
By Maria Trombly.
Even before the credit crisis hit, adoption of Microsoft Corp.’s oft-criticized Windows Vista operating system was slow on Wall Street. And with IT budgets tightening across the financial services industry, many firms are not rushing to make the switch.
For many it is not just about the [...]

This article originally appeared in Securities Industry News.
By Maria Trombly.
The promise of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a world where everything interoperates seamlessly, pieces of applications are reused endlessly and development of new systems is quick, cheap and easy. But despite some high-profile deployments and the spread of Web services, when it comes to financial firms [...]

INFOWORLD — More and more IT projects involve teams from around the world, and project leaders are asked to work 24/7. It’s time to stop the madness.

CIO MAGAZINE — OppenheimerFunds learned at least two lessons in its deployment of service-oriented architecture: Let business drive technology instead of the reverse, and switch to Agile development processes early.

SECURITIES INDUSTRY NEWS — New channels of electronic communication have been a boon to many industries, opening up sales and marketing opportunities, helping improve customer service and speeding up innovation and collaboration. For Wall Street, however, the benefits of technology such as Twitter have to be weighed against the compliance pains.

SECURITIES INDUSTRY NEWS — The Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) halted trading of Topix index futures, government bond futures and all options for nearly four hours Tuesday, when systems problems prevented the order book from being accessed by the exchange’s trading platform.

SECURITIES INDUSTRY NEWS — Credit Suisse has spun off a technology company–DynamicOps–to market an internally developed application for virtual infrastructure management.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER — Music industry groups have called the popular Chinese search engine Baidu “the largest and most incorrigible purveyor of pirated music in China.”

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER — Chinese broadcast regulators shut down eight online video sites this week in an open announcement about the sites having carried pornography, violence or content “harmful to social stability.”

SECURITIES INDUSTRY NEWS — Though the lack of a single standard for e-mail encryption has hindered adoption of the technology, financial firms are pressing slowly forward. Case in point: BNP Paribas’ announcement last month that it has implemented an encryption product from PGP Corp.

INSURANCE NETWORKING NEWS — Offshore business process outsourcing (BPO) in the insurance industry is facing new challenges, ranging from rising wages in the most popular outsourcing destinations to natural disasters.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER — Beijing courts promised heavier fines for Internet cafes that allow patrons to illegally download movies, laying down harsh fines for offenders, state-run media reported Thursday.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER — Intel Capital, Intel’s global investment group, has invested $12 million in the Shanghai Media Group for the development of the media conglomerate’s broadband TV services, SMG said late Thursday.

SECURITIES INDUSTRY NEWS — Virtualization, in one form or another, has been around almost as long as computers. When the term arose in the 1960s, it referred to the partitioning of mainframe computers. But virtualization soon became a way to let people stop worrying about the inner workings of their hardware.

SECURITIES INDUSTRY NEWS — Salesforce.com reached a milestone last fall: 1 million people using the online software company to host their customer relationship management systems and other key business processes. Those users were at more than 1,600 financial services firms including ABN Amro, SunTrust Banks, Daiwa Securities and Bear Stearns–Merrill Lynch & Co. alone accounted for 25,000.

SECURITIES INDUSTRY NEWS — Dividing a server into multiple virtual machines has brought down firms’ purchasing costs and allowed for more efficient use of existing hardware. However, virtualization also poses security risks and challenges, including managing a more complex network, additional layers of technology, potential data leaks as multiple virtual machines share common communication lines, and the threat of rogue machines.

SECURITIES INDUSTRY NEWS — IBM Corp. is building a risk management system for Guotai Junan Securities in collaboration with Algorithmics, a Toronto-based provider of enterprise risk solutions. IBM says that the risk system for the Shanghai-based brokerage is its first for a Chinese securities firm.

SECURITIES INDUSTRY NEWS — As the Web 2.0 movement makes interactive applications and social networks such as Facebook ubiquitous on employees’ desktop computers, financial firms are facing the daunting task of monitoring these so-called greynets.

SECURITIES INDUSTRY NEWS —
Customer relationship management (CRM) company Salesforce.com’s software-as-a-service model went a long way toward showing major Wall Street firms that Web-based applications can be useful and reliable. Now a number of vendors are joining the San Francisco-based company in putting their applications online and creating tools that are customizable, scalable, more manageable, and less expensive than traditional software.

SECURITIES INDUSTRY NEWS — Outsourcing firms are supplying clients with a range of integrated services and end-to-end research support.

INSURANCE NETWORKING NEWS — Patrick Snowball, executive director of Aviva UK, flew down to Mumbai, India in February to accept an award from the Indian software industry. But India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) wasn’t lauding the insurance giant for the jobs it was moving to outsourcing firms on the subcontinent. Instead, Aviva was recognized for taking jobs back.

SECURITIES INDUSTRY NEWS — In an effort to open lines of communication to employees and clients more quickly, brokerages are adopting intelligent notification systems that can reach hundreds of contacts at the touch of a button.

COMPUTERWORLD — Operational imperatives, customer demands and foreign competition are forcing a burst of IT investment that will transform Chinese banks.

SECURITIES INDUSTRY NEWS — In a sign that the maturing of the Chinese financial markets is creating new opportunities for Western technology suppliers, SunGard Data Systems of Wayne, Pa. has acquired Shanghai-based Fudan Kingstar Computer Co.