Why the blog is of interest:

Quite often, bloggers inside the financial services community link to - and even react to - the jottings of other bloggers. Bloggers also post the responses of their own readers. In a blog called "Powers Unfiltered," John Powers, president and CEO of Digipede Technologies, gives his reaction to computing consultant Marc Adler's entry on the Magmasystems blogspot about the growing demand for grid architectures in financial services. (See "Microsoft's Intensifying Moves into Financial Grids" elsewhere in "Best of the Blogs.")

As John views the grid market, developers in financial services are much more open to the .NET architecture than IT managers. "Developers who use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop their applications (.NET, COM, or anything else) find the Digipede Framework SDK provides the most natural approach available for adapting their applications to grids. And it's free, as part of the Digipede Network Developer Edition. Check it out, .NET developers - it might just be your ticket to 1,000 pounds a day!" he maintains.

"(Digipede and Microsoft) are also working together to win over the IT guys. With the new Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition (CCE), Microsoft has made the deployment and administration of many servers as easy as one (and dropped the price for compute-grid deployments, too.)" As you might expect, this posting drew some diverse feedback from readers.

The Digipede executive also writes about a lot of other topics related to partnering with Microsoft. In another blog entry, entitled "Clubbing with Steve," John tells about attending a reception at Club 21 in New York City with Steve Ballmer and some financial services execs. "Indeed, the continued positive attitude at Microsoft toward partners overall is most heartening. There's still plenty of room for improvement - but the commitment to that improvement is evident, even at the highest level," according to the blogger.

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