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London Stock Exchange To Abandon Windows
BBCWatcher writes "Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that the London Stock Exchange is abandoning its Microsoft Windows-based trading platform: 'Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation had their face slapped this September when the LSE's Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day .... Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect ...'"
Yeah I read those too ;) So windows issue or not, it is a Microsoft problem :
to wit; page 4:
"In the development, roll-out, and implementation processes, Microsoft worked closely with the London Stock Exchange to ensure not only that they understood their immediate requirements, but that the solution fitted their long-term business plans as specified in the TRM project."
and
"Robin Paine, Chief Technical Officer at the Exchange, says: âoeThe London Stock Exchange was looking for a responsive partner to engage across all phases of the Technology Roadmap programme. The collaborative approach Microsoft offered made it an ideal choice."
Any more questions on whether Microsoft was "really" involved? Then go do your own research -- there never was any doubt.
I worked for Accenture in one of the "delivery centres" in the Eastern Europe and it was total crap. They hired 1st and 2nd year students for peanuts, and sold them as professionals to rich foreign companies. The turnover of staff was about a third - after one learned something, it was best to get out of there as soon as possible. From the posts on the glassdoor i can infer that this is the strategy accenture employs worldwide.
accenture just sucks.
Yes i will second that, responsiveness is one of the most important aspects to traders...
They have special keyboards tailored to their particular trading applications so you can enter trades quicker...
They have dedicated lines between sites because a vpn going over the internet would be slower...
They use unencrypted and often unauthenticated protocols to reduce the overhead.
They intentionally use very short or no passwords so they are quicker to enter...
Security, cost, all secondary factors to the need for low latency.
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Clever marketing, but irrelevant. As you note - in passing - this is for the information dissemination system, not for the trading system. It's there so people can do non-real-time-critical look-up of past trades. NASDAQ wouldn't trust their trading system to Windows.
Every trade processed in the NASDAQ marketplace goes through the system
Yes, it goes through the Windows stack after it has been processed by the trading system. Which used to run on a POSIX system on MIPS Tandem hardware the year after your MDDS system was installed. I can't find anymore recent info even on the NASDAQ site.
I was just going to post this, but you beat me to it. The NASDAQ Supermontage trading trading system ran on HP Nonstop hardware (which is where the Tandem/MIPS technology ended up) and I believe is now using Itanium. The system is was home grown by NASDAQ and they have a good in house software division. http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=101738 I don't know if that switch actually happened, but claiming NASDAQ trades on Windows is certainly not correct. The marketing was clever enough to fool anyone who would believe Windows can have that sort of performance and uptime ;)
...Airbus's belief that humans cannot react as quickly to dangerous situations as computers and Boeing's belief that computers cannot make judgments as well as humans in dangerous situations.
I used to work for Boeing. Boeing's IT department is a huge fan of Microsoft products (Possibly due to the proximity. Boeing Commercial HQ is just a chair's throw away from Microsoft). Engineering's decision to provide pilots absolute authority over autopilot functions stems in part from their experience in dealing with Microsoft office systems.