Today's Brokers to Become Advisors To Internet-Savvy Investors: Sharma

Raj Sharma is president and CEO of New York-based Hydraweb Technologies, a company that he founded in 1996. Previously, in 1992, Sharma founded SOS Corporation, which provided network management services for large commercial network sites such as AT&T, Viacom International, Heine Securities, EJV Partners and Wasserstein & Parella. Sharma is a computer science graduate of Columbia University where he was director of computer operations at the Institute of Medical Research.

The Hydraweb products extend standard TCP/IP and UDP/IP load balancing for LANs, WANs, intranets and Web computing. While Hydraweb established itself as a provider of application-aware, load-balancing products for Web computing, its technology has applications in the LAN environment of a Reuters Triarch installation. (See related story, this issue.)

Some of the company's clients in the securities industry such as ILX Systems, First Union National Bank and Merrill Lynch have been using the Hydraweb technology to juggle a variety of workloads.

There have been retail uses of Hydraweb products--DLJdirect, the online brokerage of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ) is a case in point. The LAN/WAN load balancing capabilities are based upon the Hydraperformance Intelligent Agent technology, which gathers information about application availability as well as server software and hardware resource performance. The agent technology allows for granular load balancing control aimed at helping users maximize overall system-level performance.

Hydraweb says it provides load-balancing solutions to 80 per cent of the Fortune 500 securities industry firms and many of the major market data distribution providers.

The company can be reached at http://www.hydraweb.com and will be at booth 3045 at Fall Internet World 1998, October 5-9, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in midtown Manhattan.

What is the biggest trend that you are seeing in trading room technology?

A move toward e-brokerage and away from traditional broker-based sales is driving costs down and putting the customer at the forefront of the transaction. In addition, market data that used to be controlled by the broker is being made available to end users.

The last major project conducted by Hydraweb was a cooperative effort with Reuters to increase the resiliency and manageability of the Triarch-based market data distribution system. In addition, a cooperative project with Bridge Information Systems focused on increasing performance and resiliency of the Bridgechannel offering. Both of these projects leveraged the HydraAPI product to allow for customization of the Hydraweb solution to meet the unique needs of each customer.

Hydraweb is focused on a third generation load-balancing and enhanced resiliency product. This product enhances second generation application-aware load balancing by adding quality of service to the balancing equation.

What will be the biggest challenge that trading room IT managers will face over the coming year, and what kinds of solutions will you be proposing for it?

Providing scalable technology that is able to absorb very high upside volume while not costing too much more than today's offering. Hydraweb provides technology that maximizes overall server capacity and allows the IS organization to add capacity without the end user being adversely affected by the change.

E-brokerage and high-speed trading are on the way. This should allow for higher volumes than previously allowed through the automation of all aspects of trading.

Nothing--end user demand for lower-priced trades is driving the adoption of technology [that provides a direct link] to the trading floor. This, combined with higher levels of security and increased Internet usage, will drive advances of automation in the trading process.

The current brokers will likely become advisors to the Internet-savvy investors of tomorrow.

Seven by twenty-four hour operation is by far the thing that I worry about the most. One primary value that these electronic trading floors provide is the availability to make trading decisions any time during the day.

The additional value, provided by the e-brokerage paradigm shift, is to minimize the cost of processing the request, thus saving the client money.