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The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Sifma Rocked!

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I’m referring to last week’s Sifma Technology Management Conference and Exhibit in NYC. True, the new name (the result of the SIA’s merger with the Bond Association) was a bit of a put off – many people suggested that Sifma sounded like some horrible strain of bird flu – but otherwise it’s been the best SIA (sic) Show I’ve been to in years.

Some people, of course, said there was nothing new or exciting to see. Those are the kinds of people who responded to Neil Armstrong’s “One small step …” way back in 1969 with a “so what?” shrug. For most of us, it was an exciting and exhausting experience … take a look at www.sifmashowblog.com for some great photos!

Low latency was the buzz of the show … with many companies covered on this site in attendance. A bundle of press releases were generated covering new products, upgrades, collaborations, benchmarks and more. Take a look back through last week’s posts on this site to see what I mean.

The real interest areas for me: (1) Infiniband is getting a lot of attention, with companies like Voltaire and Cisco making waves; (2) Hardware acceleration is hotting up, with a lot of action surrounding AMD’s Torrenza initiative and the entrant of players like Tervela into the hardware-accelerated middleware space; and (3) benchmarking is all the rage, with questions starting to be asked about how benchmarks are being conducted, how to compare them, and whether standards might be developed.

What else? I just loved the white coats of the men from Stac … A-Team’s new A-Team Insight Quarterly ‘sold out’ halfway through the show, Brits on the Street on Monday did the job, there was a really cute girl on the AOL/Relegence booth and the Harris Radio compilation I produced for SunGard was a resounding success (so they tell me).

All in all, the show was a real endorsement that a website like this is needed to act as a focal point for all things low latency. Nice to know we get it right sometimes and we’ll be keeping at it. As always, we’d love your comments on anything we write.

Until next time … here’s some good music!

[tags]sifma,cisco,voltaire,tervela,amd,torrenza,sungard,harris radio,stac,nlx[/tags]

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