About a-team Marketing Services
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: Modernising Equities Trading Infrastructure: Architecture, Resilience and the Economics of Change

Date: 14 October 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Equities markets are entering a more distributed, always-on phase. Liquidity is fragmenting across venues and geographies, trading hours are extending toward 24/5 and beyond, and market data volumes, investor expectations and competitive pressure are all rising at once. Many...

BLOG

Where Should Trading Firms Spend Their Latency Budget?

The pursuit of lower latency in electronic trading hasn’t disappeared, but the engineering decisions behind it are becoming more selective. Rather than trying to make every component of the trading stack as fast as possible, firms need to determine where microseconds genuinely affect trading outcomes, where predictable performance matters more than absolute speed, and where...

EVENT

Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference, London, hosted by A-Team Group

Now in its 8th year, the Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference managed by A-Team Group, is the premier content forum and networking event for investment firms and hedge funds.

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...