Listening to the Rabble

While in the past I have been wary of grass-roots movements that impose a technology on a firm's IT managers, I think I have found an instance where the IT rabble has been right. The case in point is the Bank of America (BofA).

Speaking at a briefing in New York last week sponsored by Sun Microsystems and Gigaspaces Technologies, B.J. Fesq, the chief technical architect, global markets technology at BofA, outlined a data distribution project that sprang from a rare consensus among its 2,000 developers. After meeting with them, it became clear to upper management that data latency is a problem for almost all of them. Something had to be done to improve data caching and distribution. These capabilities are becoming the key elements needed to facilitate the electronic trading that is spreading among the firm's global equities, fixed-income, foreign exchange, swaps and derivatives groups, Fesq says.

"It really wasn't something that was top down," Fesq says. "It started out as grass roots—it came to us. We put a management framework around it."

It's not that this situation is unique to BofA. Historically, data latency has been a problem industry-wide for securities firms, affecting the front-, middle- and back-office groups, and BofA chose to confront it.

The management framework led to the identification of key business requirements: low latency to support high-performance operations; uptime and speed; high availability and instantaneous failover; and scalability for systems. There also had to be a fit with the incumbent environment of Java, C++, the Microsoft .Net framework, Java Message Service (JMS), SQL and XML. The bank needs improved data distribution and caching in order to "decompose complex calculations," Fesq adds.

Thus the project began in earnest this past October with an initial rollout of Gigaspaces' offerings in December 2005 for existing hardware, Fesq says. A handful of internal business groups, representing "a few hundred nodes," have now gone live with the Gigaspaces solutions on Linux- and Sun Solaris-based hardware, he says.

Much of the rollout is expected to continue throughout this year. "Every business is looking at it for their front and back offices," he says. Including capital markets, as many as 18 groups within BofA—corporate treasury, equity finance products (derivatives), cash securities and so forth—could sign up for the data distribution solution.

The project could also lead to the deployment of new hardware and the firm is exploring its options including benchmarking the Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 servers running the Gigaspaces software. The testing is significant because the Niagara servers have "a fundamental change in the chipset," Fesq says.

The project is also significant because it's an enlightened response to the wishes of the IT foot soldiers.

Please send your comments to eugene.grygo@incisivemedia.com.