Wall Street User Groups Push To End Middleware Chaos In Trading Rooms

NEW YORK--The vagaries of middleware have led to the creation of two Wall Street user groups that serve as strong evidence of how crucial middleware has become to the global trading strategies of major firms.

While the two groups are tackling different aspects of middleware, the Wall Street Middleware Working Group (WSMWG), an invitation-only organization created five months ago, and the Securities Industry Middleware Council (SIMC), in existence since May 1997, may wind up working together--underscoring the widespread nature of middleware.

The Working Group had its first meeting this past April in Manhattan and an eventful second meeting in June when the "Quantum Leap" pricing server was unveiled. The server was built from off-the-shelf products including Persistence's Powertier application server, built to the group's specifications. The group will meet again in October.

The main difference between WSMWG and the SIMC appears to be one of scope. The Working Group has as its reasons for being the need to develop real-life solutions from existing products as well as the needs to drive defacto standards and best practices for the securities industry, says Christopher Keene, president and CEO of Persistence Software (TTW, April 6). "It's the same kind of effort that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs led for the acceptance of Sybase on Wall Street," says Keene.

By narrowing down membership to the leading user firms on Wall Street, the Working Group will enable these financial technology peers to show others on Wall Street "that this is how to get middleware to work", explains Keene who adds that it's also easier to build consensus with a smaller group. While membership is restricted, some major players such as IBM and Microsoft have been encouraged to take part in future meetings of the Working Group, says Keene.

Users of Persistence's products such as Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan have populated the WSMWG and vendors such as Neon/MSB (formerly known as MSB Consultants) and Iona Technologies are also participating in the new group. In fact, JP Morgan is testing the "Quantum Leap" derivatives pricing server devised by Working Group members that uses technologies from Neon/MSB, Iona and Persistence (TTW, August 17). Providing group members and others with a pricing server solution is really what the Working Group is all about, says Keene. The solutions that the Working Group promotes will come from off-the-shelf products "where previously users had to build it", rather than from standards that were years in the making, says Keene. Vendors play a pivotal role in the Working Group and the SIMC.

Vendors will be taking part in the Working Group's upcoming benchmarking project, says Keene. Persistence and the Working Group members "are kicking off the mother of all middleware benchmarks to identify performance metrics for application server architectures," explains Keene. "Tibco and Sun Microsystems are working with us to show the performance you can get from an OLTP application server when you combine it with top notch hardware and scalable messaging. The result will be a prescriptive model that defines what distributed architectures work best for various classes of financial applications."

In contrast, "a great end-product for SIMC would be a significant contribution or even the writing of a standard," says Keene. "I think what they're doing is extremely valuable--influencing standards that will drive the industry."

An example of this approach was the SIMC's "experimental relationship" with the Open Group in January of this year that resulted in a security solution based upon the Open Group's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) specification (TTW, June 15). The effort was also an attempt to discover how a vertical industry like the one represented by the SIMC could affect the overall industry standards effort.

The SIMC does have a wider scope than the Working Group and deals with a wider array of vendors, says Eliot Solomon, chairman of the SIMC. Solomon is also senior technical director for the Securities Industry Automation Corporation (SIAC), based in the Brooklyn borough of New York.

Several important members of the Working Group are using Persistence's products and thus they are "tightly focused on a particular class of middleware", points out Solomon. The SIMC, when it was founded, set up focus groups covering a wide assortment of middleware issues such as: operations administration and management; messaging; security (within an enterprise); directories and naming; and industry overview.

"The SIMC is pleased that another organization exists that is devoted to middleware," Solomon says of the Working Group. "There are plenty of opportunities for lots of organizations to be effective." Toward that end, the SIMC will be reorganizing itself in the autumn to become a more effective group, says Solomon. "We've been more successful than we thought we'd be," he adds.

Although the Working Group and the SIMC are attacking the chaos of middleware from different angles, they may find common ground, say Solomon and Keene. Solomon points out that the SIMC and the Working Group share several of the same members such as Chase, JP Morgan, Citibank, Merrill Lynch and UBS (prior to the merger with SBC). "We hope that there will be opportunities to collaborate with the Working Group in the future," Solomon says.

Keene is also aware that the two groups may cross paths. "I could see a time where our group could become a separate group within the SIMC," says Keene.