… Getting better all the time. That’s my assessment of the economy as far as spending on IT by Wall Street is concerned. Sorry, having just picked up the remastered Beatles classic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, I couldn’t resist tapping Lennon/McCartney’s track 4 title for this blog post.
I’ll offer just a couple of data points. First, near to home for me, the record numbers that attended last month’s High Performance Computing on Wall Street event. Nearly 20 world-class sponsors supported the day, the exhibit space was sold out, and the entire event was, as Intersect 360 Research’s analyst CEO Addison Snell put it, “packed.”
Another item of news piqued my attention the other day. Mellanox Technologies – a data centre networking vendor – is raising its third quarter financial guidance to a record $32 to $32.5 million – that’s up 26% on the second quarter, and 11% on its 2008 third quarter. We’ll have to wait until October 21 for the final figures but the news is very good. Mellanox’s InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet technology underpins low latency trading architectures, data centre virtualisation and cloud computing. Make the connection.
And to put these signals in context, think back just a year to the death of Lehman Brothers and those botched bailouts, and one would have had to then agree with Lennon’s pessimistic contribution to that song, that “It can’t get no worse.”
A final note, staying with the Beatles theme, is to say thanks to Blade Network Technologies CEO Vikram Mehta for gifting copies of The White Album to fellow participants in the HPC on WS panel on “Building The World’s Fastest Trading Network” … and of course – while the company is not allowed to mention it – we now know the role being played by Blade in NYSE Euronext’s ambitious plans, which represent its own vote for the future.
