IT spending on market data infrastructures to reach USD 7.8B by the end of 2010

According to this report by Aite, trading systems growth is set to continue at around 1B a year for the next 3 years. Among the factors challenging vendors, Aite mentions markets fragmentation and a further increase in data volume, which in most cases is already at a critical level for most of today's OM/ES platforms (believe me, I know something about it):

"Trading systems have not kept up with the growth in data coming at them," says Brad Bailey, senior analyst with Aite Group and co-author of this report. "The complexity of the high-performance infrastructure and the rapidity with which it evolves has created opportunities for specialized vendors."


Technorati Tags: trading systems

Majestic Research

The trading strategies in the Demo account look for patterns based on information collected from standard K1 and Q1 filings and price/volume data. I always thought about developing a model based on an alternative data set and Majestic Research seems to offer that option. Their databases includes industry-specific historical data, such as "Yield per RPM" and "Passenger revenue estimates" for airline companies, and "Cancellation rates" and "Planned inventory trends" for homebuilders.


Technorati Tags: investing

India IT salary growth

In a previous post I wrote about IT India off-shore costs rising and how the open source model offers a better alternative to infrastructures savings. Today I came across this article on Forbes putting some figures on Indian IT salary growth:

As the fight for talent intensified last year, salary hikes rose from
the previous year’s average of 14.4%, according to the study. In 2008,
compensation is expected to increase by an average of 15.2%, making it
the fifth consecutive year that salaries have risen in excess of 10%.

Real estate salaries grew by an average of 25.2%, compared with 17.6% in retail and 16.4% in banking and finance.

Clearly, the IT off-shoring model can not be sustained with these numbers in mind. A mixed software development model is emerging, where commercial code representing significant, core competitive advantage follows the classic copyrighted model, while larger parts of the development effort is released as open source for the benefit of higher quality service and lower infrastructure costs. Nothing new really under the sun: major innovators such as Apple, Google and Yahoo have followed this path for years now, with the introduction of operating systems and search engines based on open source code. Microsoft and Oracle are following: here and here.

New software players like Trolltech and MySQL have adopted a dual licensing model, where open source code can be either used in commercial applications for a fee, or else modifications to the original code must be released with the same open-source license.


Technorati Tags: open source, off-shoring