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

Perception is Everything!

Subscribe to our newsletter

Last month, Low-Latency.com ran an online poll asking whether Microsoft or Sun Microsystems was better at offering low latency solutions. The result: 30 percent went with Sun, seven percent with Microsoft. But the majority – 63 percent – reckoned neither company is a player in this space.

I have to say I feel a little bit sorry for both companies (no, not very sorry as the figures demonstrate your marketing problem) since both are indeed providing useful technology to the low latency world.

Microsoft’s server software underpins offerings from many middleware and event processing vendors, and its recent efforts in conjunction with Gigaspaces demonstrate it’s a credible player in the high performance computing market. Meanwhile, Sun’s hardware and software has been a part of several impressive benchmarks documented on this portal.

True, both companies are providing technology infrastructure and reference architectures, and not full solutions, but the same can be said of companies like Intel, which has won hearts and minds through a lot of effort (and money – some of it supporting this portal) to get their value messages out there.

Just thought I’d make that observation. Oh, yeah, it’s budget time for 2008 and we’d love to hear from you all!

And, if you don’t have any money, then why not participate in this month’s poll on direct feeds instead!

Until next time … here’s some great music! [tags]sun,sun microsystems,microsoft[/tags]

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Navigating the Build vs Buy Dilemma: Cloud Strategies for Accelerating Quantitative Research

Date: 20 May 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes For many quantitative trading firms and asset managers, building a self-provisioned historical market data environment remains one of the most time-consuming and resource-intensive steps in establishing a new research capability. Sourcing data, normalising symbologies, handling corporate actions and maintaining...

BLOG

Quantum Readiness in Trading: Why Cryptography and Data Governance Matter More Than Qubits

Quantum computing is becoming one of the most widely discussed emerging technologies in financial markets infrastructure. In industry commentary, the technology is often framed either as a revolutionary engine for trading performance or as an existential threat to the cryptographic systems that secure global finance. In practice however, the near-term impact is likely to be...

EVENT

ExchangeTech Summit London

A-Team Group, organisers of the TradingTech Summits, are pleased to announce the inaugural ExchangeTech Summit London on May 14th 2026. This dedicated forum brings together operators of exchanges, alternative execution venues and digital asset platforms with the ecosystem of vendors driving the future of matching engines, surveillance and market access.

GUIDE

Preparing For Primetime – How to Benefit from the Global LEI

They say time flies when you’re enjoying yourself, and so it seems the industry have been having a blast with its preparations for the introduction of the global legal entity identifier (LEI) next month. But now it’s time to get serious. To date, much of the industry debate has centred on the identifier itself: its...