About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Old Friends, Familiar Faces, Some Surprises

Subscribe to our newsletter

I am posting this from the San Francisco Bay Area, and it just struck me that a couple of major players from these parts were recently the subject of posts on this portal.  What’s more, they are companies that – despite being once huge on Wall Street – I hadn’t expected to be covering in connection with the world of low latency.  I speak of Sybase and Sun Microsystems.

Sybase first.  At one time, Sybase sold its database to virtually every Wall Street firm.  A good many installations such exist, due mainly to the difficulty in migrating from one database to another.  But for several years now, the database hasn’t had much success in the financial markets – where it’s been well and truly beaten up by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and even the open source MySQL.

True, Sybase did have something of a re-emergence through its Financial Fusion FIX messaging and banking business, but that kinda fizzled out when the high tech bubble burst.  Once a candidate for an IPO, Financial Fusion got buried inside Sybase corporate and hasn’t been let out.

Now, though, Sybase is making some waves again, partly with its Risk Analytics Platform and through the development of its high performance Sybase IQ analytics server, which it is pitching at algorithmic trading applications.  There’s a ton of competition out there of course, but it’s nice to see Sybase back with some relevant products.

Then there is Sun, a company that once epitomized Silicon Valley, and which surely owned Wall Street’s server business.  Then along came the x86 and Linux, and the ostrich-like company was out, just like Sybase.  It did make a lame attempt to “win back Wall Street” but that never really got past the marketing hype, so out it stayed.

It was a surprise, then, to see a Sun server (albeit powered by AMD chips) and its Solaris operating system as the subject of a benchmark report from Peter Lankford’s Securities Technology Analysis Center.  And even more of a surprise when Peter separately suggested to me that the combo had performed well.  A swallow does not a summer make, but maybe the Sun has not yet completely set.

So, what do you think? Do Sybase and Sun stand a chance of capturing past glory on Wall Street?  Is there too much competition this time?  Or did they never go away?  Leave your comments.

Until next time … here’s some good music.

[tags]sun,sun microsystems,sybase,financial fusion,aleri,quant house,stac,solaris,x86,linux,amd[/tags]

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: The future of market data – Harnessing cloud and AI for market data distribution and consumption

Market data is the lifeblood of trading, but as data volumes grow and real-time demands increase, traditional approaches to distribution and consumption are being pushed to their limits. Cloud technology and AI-driven solutions are rapidly transforming how financial institutions manage, process, and extract value from market data, offering greater scalability, efficiency, and intelligence. This webinar,...

BLOG

A-Team Group Announces Winners of its TradingTech Insight Awards Europe 2025

A-Team Group has revealed the winners of the TradingTech Insight Awards Europe 2025. These prestigious awards celebrate excellence in trading solutions and services, highlighting vendors who provide outstanding trading infrastructure, technology, and data solutions to capital markets participants across Europe. This year, the awards featured over 40 categories of trading technology solutions and services. These...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit London

Now in its 14th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

MiFID II Handbook

As the 3 January 2018 compliance deadline for Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) approaches, A-Team Group has pulled together everything you need to know about the regulation in a precise and concise handbook. The MiFID II Handbook, commissioned by Thomson Reuters, provides a guide to aspects of the regulation that will have...