Although it is always important to keep Windows up-to-date, actually delivering the latest software to far-flung end-users isn’t necessarily simple. But ING Investment Management has found that combining Microsoft SMS (Systems Management Server) 2003 with a remote wakeup product from 1E provides an easy solution for its current Windows XP installation.

“We want to get as close as possible to being a 100 percent Microsoft shop,” says Richard Peterson, senior desktop engineer in ING Investment Management’s Information Technology (IT) Department.

Like increasing numbers of other financial firms throughout the globe, Edinburgh, Scotland-based Xchange Business has turned to a Windows-based grid computer system as an alternative to a mainframe for scaling its business outward and upward.

Why? Economics is the most compelling driver, according to officials of this major player in the international foreign currency exchange and money transfer markets.

Growing business in volatile times requires a client-centric approach

Between recession predictions, the credit crunch, volatile markets, regula- tory fines, scandals, and massive write-downs, recent financial headlines have been predominantly negative and fear-inducing, eroding confidence in the economic health of the nation—and of its citizens and businesses.

It’s no coincidence that hand-in-hand with these headlines have come others that indicate a loss of trust in the institutions that provide financial services to the country’s businesses, citizens, and institutions. For many financial services providers, it feels like being kicked when they are down—they are unsure how to grapple with a crisis of trust in addition to their current economic woes.

Eikos Partners is a strategic IT consulting firm whose partners, Michael DeSanti, Brian Slater and David Lattimore-Gay, have held significant roles in large financial firms as well as in the consulting industry. With a focus on the financial industry, and in particular on capital markets, the firm seeks to help firms improve the return on their IT investments and strengthen the link between business needs and IT. We spoke with David Lattimore-Gay about some of the work that Eikos Partners has done with hedge fund clients, and his observations on how Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) has helped improve the speed with which hedge funds can shift and modify data views in order to maintain a “proprietary edge” in the marketplace.

With so many investors eyeing the equity options market these days, Morningstar, Inc., a major provider of investment research, is now enthusiastically embracing a Windows-driven equity options data feed.

“Equity options are increasingly popular with the people we serve,” says Philip Guziec, derivatives specialist at Chicago, IL-based Morningstar. “We have 120 researchers here who analyze investment value and risk. So we need high-quality equity options data for them to evaluate.”

Whether the overall job market is up or down, highly skilled financial advisors are always in huge demand. To help gain a keener competitive edge in recruiting these advisors, and improve efficiency along the way, Lincoln Financial Group has replaced its long-time paper-oriented work environment with a Windows-based ECM (electronic content management) system from Hyland Software.

Although based in Philadelphia, the 100 year-old firm now offers financial products such as retirement plans, insurance, and annuities, nationwide, relying on a coast-to-coast network of 2,000 financial planners to advise customers on how to create financial strategies and employee programs tailored to specific needs.

With the completion of the acquisition of Parlano, producer of the MindAlign persistent group chat service, in early October, Microsoft’s Unified Communications Strategy has taken another leap forward.

“Until now, all we’ve had is a person-centric view,” says Shaun Pierce, general manager, Server Products, Unified Communications Group, Microsoft. “We already have instant messaging and a form of group chat, but they [Parlano] provide a completely different lens on the way to communicate, which instead of being person-to-person is topic-based.”

For almost two years William F. Adiletta has served as president of TekFinancial Solutions, working to expand the company’s offering in the financial community in areas such as enterprise integration, electronic trading systems development, wealth management, SOX compliance, managed IT services, network security and FIX integration. Over the past 25 years, he has developed wide expertise in financial IT through various roles, including serving as CIO of Global Crossing and holding several executive positions at Optimark where he developed exchange systems for the Pacific Stock Exchange, NASDAQ and the Osaka Stock Exchange. We spoke to him about recent experiences helping clients move from Visual Basics to .NET and how the move often signifies a change in the way firms approach business.

Like many investment firms, ML Stern has long taken seriously its responsibility to store and archive email. As a result, its email archiving and retention system had been installed years ago.

“It was prehistoric,” complains Mike Urman, ML Stern senior vice president of marketing and operations.

• Ten More Spanish Banks Select SunGard’s BancWare
• Jefferies Prime Brokerage Partners With Linedata
• IP Commerce Pushes Reseller Program
• Microsoft Buys Parlano
• Formicary Becomes Microsoft Certified Partner
• Brazil’s Mellon Serviços Financeiros Selects Charles River
• Microsoft Aids South African Startup
• XSP Partners with Web Services Integration Limited to Offer Withholding Tax Reclamation
• SlaterLabs Signs Two-Year Support Contract with Microsoft
• Wolters Kluwer Ships Microsoft .NET Version of Expere
• Clear2Pay Delivers Open Payments Framework on Microsoft Platforms
• Fiserv-CheckFree Aims for Both Core Processing and Online Lead

JPMorgan entered production early this year with an electronic trading application which uses a .NET-based treemap tool for instantly analyzing client sales.

“The treemaps give us a clear picture in real-time of what’s happening across a large volume of (sales) data. This is something we’ve never been able to do before, and the feedback from our clients is quite positive,” notes Daniel T. Marsh, a London-based project manager in JPMorgan’s electronic trading area.

Raymond James’ 4,640 advisors have complete flexibility in how they manage their customer relationships. Until recently, that also meant the customer relationship management (CRM) tools the advisors used were locally managed, and may have varied from homegrown spreadsheet type systems to third-party solutions individually selected at each location.

This spring, Raymond James began offering its advisors a new proposition. Working with Microsoft, Raymond James launched a centrally-managed Microsoft Dynamics CRM system intended to give its advisors the latest tools and functionality for managing customer relationships without the advisor having to undertake the effort involved in implementing, maintaining and backing up a system for managing extensive client data.

StreamBase Systems (www.streambase.com), a leader in the fast-growing complex event processing (CEP) market, has pioneered a remarkable new approach to processing and analyzing real-time streaming data. Founded by data management experts who have been driving industry innovation for decades and backed by top-tier investor firms, StreamBase has developed a new class of stream processing software. Global organizations are witnessing its high performance coupled with its intuitive graphical development environment that eliminates the need for costly, inflexible custom-coding.

We recently spoke with Barry Morris, Chairman and CEO of StreamBase Systems, Inc. about high-performance CEP and the trends that are driving its adoption in financial markets.

Whether it’s traders reacting to hourly stock fluctuations or brokers responding to unexpected transaction requests, the financial services industry moves quickly, and leaves little room for error. Few understand this better than Infusion Development, a unique IT consulting, solutions and training firm with headquarters in Toronto and New York as well as offices in Boston, and London, UK. Infusion Development counts some of the world’s largest financial companies among its clientele.

Since opening its doors in 1998, Infusion Development has grown steadily to over 175 employees, a feat the independently owned company attributes to its passion for new technology.

“Infusion Development has made its mark through remaining focused on emerging technologies,” says Alim Somani, president, Infusion Development. “We use some of the latest and greatest Microsoft products to drive collaboration and innovation in the trading floors and operations areas of Toronto, New York and London’s most influential financial institutions.”

The markets are fragmenting, transactional volumes are exploding, costs are rising and so too are clients’ demands as firms confront regulatory demands, new technologies, whether to build, buy or outsource – and now there’s cross-asset trading. Through it all, reference data at its core continues to be about descriptive transactional information.

For senior reference data executives like State Street Global Advisors’ John White, one of 10 participants at a recent Advisory Council roundtable co-sponsored by Microsoft and Avanade, who said, “We all need to be extremely nimble as the markets change,” the challenges are real. Here is that hour-long conversation moderated by WFS contributing editor Marty Rabkin. It opens with issues some of the participants wanted to tackle and concludes online at www.windowsfs.com/referencedata.

Is the market ready for a combined order management-execution management system?

Stockgroup’s Collaborative Technologies for Investors