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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 ...'"
I'm in the industry, so I have a little more background on this. They spent about 40M GBP building the system, and it's only been used for two years. It was (entirely?) outsourced to Accenture. Other reasons why the system sucks: It can only handle about 10,000 orders/second, and has latency numbers that are incredibly high (5 milliseconds+).
Looking at other exchanges, there are trading platforms that have been able to last 10+ years while scaling quite well.
TradElect was/is a project management and technical disaster.
Did the project. They needed a dedicated response time in the 1/100th second range and used a combination of Windows, SQL Server and .Net!
The project was doomed from day 0!
The article is at fault here, Windows alone is not at fault it is the entire stack beginning from the OS up to the implementation language which is at fault!
NYSE and OMX both run Linux based systems. I trade on OMX Stockholm and there is a lot of hickups. I've heard a lot of bad things about NYSE too.
...is just the WRONG platform for this. Stock Exchange, like many transaction based business, needs real time systems and Windows 2003 plus SQL as far I know don't make a RT platform.
It's more than that, it's the OS that the software has to run on (since the OS handles the majority of the context switching and thread prioritization - which affect performance when you're shooting for something that approximates a real-time system), and it's the DB that the software ties into. The fanboism (both on the linux side and microsoft side) is annoying, I'll grant you that, but this DOES have something to do with the OS.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
I worked on trading systems at the CBOE for a couple of years and one thing I can say for sure is that the only Microsoft systems there are the front-ends for the traders who insist on Windows. All the back-ends, where the real activity takes place, everything is Linux. So, only the trader GUIs are Windows, and everything else is Linux running on x86 blades - racks and racks of them. We never got a virus or trojan on the trading systems, but we were scrubbing viruses and other malware off the traders' front-ends all the time. Anyway, when I read about the LSE going with a Microsoft solution for their trading infrastructure, I could only shake my head and say "Remember Denver International Airport!"...
; the application was developed in joint by Accenture AND Microsoft.
"Accenture"? You mean Andersen Consulting? The people that you'd have to be a complete idiot to do business with after the Enron disaster?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
MS used to run lots of ads, including banner ads on slashdot, about how the london stock exchange chose windows over linux... Those ads stopped very quickly when they had the big outage a few months ago.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
MS used to run lots of ads, including banner ads on slashdot, about how the london stock exchange chose windows over linux... Those ads stopped very quickly when they had the big outage a few months ago.
Several European banks had their asses handed back to them, too, last spring for trying to shove their Windows-uberalles ideology into their core activities. For several months it was (maybe still is) practically impossible to do basic banking. People could go into others accounts, money from their own accounts could not be transfered, money could not be paid into their accounts. It was a hardship for many small businesses that were stupid enough to put their business accounts at a bank where ideology trumps technology. When your own customers can't pay you, money becomes a problem. There, too, the problem lay squarely on the attempt to use MS .NET instead of something workable. It's just a half-assed copy of Java locked into one vendor. After the banks getting bad press for weeks, there was a vague statement made about the company that takes care of the network, but not tying that statement to the ongoing outages.
It's not important to laugh at MS for making crap products, it's important to not use them. The problem with MS products has been around as long as the company itself so it's not like so-called technical 'experts' can claim ignorance or any other excuse. Adding the phrase "with a computer" doesn't absolve criminal negligence for recommending MS products.
Technology might be a matter of choice, but as the late US Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, has said, the right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. So, that choice does not include the right to screw things up beyond belief for everyone else. It's not a nameless or faceless "terrorist" group that is costing our businesses, shutting down our infrastructure, tangling our air traffic control, our power grid, our hospitals, or stock exchanges and banks. The people promoting Windows and Microsoft technologies have real names and faces and walk among us every day. Take them out and we've won the first round. Why is the military sitting on its hands here? The damage is easy to add up and it's even easier to remove the cause. A side benefit from the cleanup would be a restoration of the freemarket and the usual subsequent boom of economic activity.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
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.
I've heard the same story from friends who worked for Accenture in São Paulo, Brazil (Accenture's largest office in South America). My former bosses also worked for Accenture soon after graduating with engineering degrees.
Accenture's usual technique is to hire students or recent graduates from technical fields, who are reasonably capable in programming and computer science but know absolutely nothing about the consulting problems at hand or the software platforms which they use. Accenture gives them a weekend's notice before allocating them in real world projects they were not trained to do. These employees are overworked, underpaid, deliver substandard services and most end up quitting after one or two years. The few who don't quit and aren't complete morons get promoted.