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I went along to the XTrakter Annual User Conference in London on Thursday - Good event with some great speakers. Angela Knight, CEO of the British Bankers Association, gave a talk to start off the day. Angela seemed a lot less on the defensive than when I have heard her on national radio here in the UK, usually being interrogated by some journalist who wants answers to difficult questions on the financial crisis and the banks role within it.
Angela said that we were in year 3 of the "crisis" with 2008 being about the banks, 2009 being about governments and politics and 2010 being the year of sovereign debt. I guess she enjoyed saying this but that everyone is blaming "Anglo Saxon Banking" for our problems and yet it was not the banks that contributed to the fundamental problems that Greece is facing.
One major theme of her talk was decidedly Euro-Sceptic in tone, which was that the UK idea of internationality and international trade was different from that of Europe. She perceived that in the UK one of our trading parties is Europe, whereas international trade in Europe was more about inter-European and not world-wide trade - I think that there are elements of truth in this but not sure that Germany industry for example would agree that it is not conscious of truly "global" trade? She said that she was concerned by the rules and regulation being put up by governments, particularly in respect of there being too much and in too short a time.
Angela was an engaging speaker and at the very least her opinions prompt reaction, however I have to end this quick post with the best quote of the morning from Anthony Belchambers, CEO of the Futures and Options Association. Anthony said that current frenzy around political and regulatory initiatives to control the financial markets remind him of:
"A bar room brawl, where the brawlers don't punch the person that started the fight, they punch the person they have always wanted to punch..."
I went along to a morning panel on counterparty data management on Tuesday, sponsored by GoldenSource, Avox and Interactive Data, and hosted by Virginie O'Shea of the A-Team. Counterparty data obviously has a very high profile currently in light of recent events, however the advice from the panel fundamentally seemed to be get the basics of data management right (ownership, control, consistency, quality, transparency), rather than anything radically new.
There was some debate about the possible extension of BIC (Bank Identifier Code) to be used more generally as a standard for a unique business entity identifier - this seemed to be received well but there were concerns that such an initiative would not solve the problem but rather become an addition to the already complex entity-mapping process.
The "Data Utility" from the ECB was also debated, and it was refreshing to here some negative (realistic?) things said about it, such as the concern raised by Interactive that this might involve huge public spend without necessarily understanding why a new government sponsored entity would be able to do better than existing data providers. Obviously a data provider would say that, but I have to agree, it seems there is too much focus on having a data utility and not looking at the different options for solving industry data issues (one option obviously being a data utility, but lets not pre-package the problem with a solution but more of that in later posts...).
For more detail on the event, then take a look at Virginie's blog post.
Given that I am English and can tend to start many personal introductions with a short conversation about the weather (generally either "awful" or "not bad for this time of year"...), then maybe I should be very receptive to the use of weather-related expressions in technology such as the "cloud". Maybe not however since the "cloud" and "cloud computing" have reached that zenith of marketing hype, when everyone is talking about a new technology regardless of if they are sure what it actually is (or might be, or could become...).
Anyway, I finally swallowed my cynicism and on Thursday morning went along to "Migrating Business to the Cloud", an event by Microsoft hosted at Bafta (small venue where the UK deals out its equivalent (?) of the Oscars). The master of ceremonies was Mark Taylor of Microsoft, who gave a general introduction to what Microsoft are doing in the "cloud", and of particular note he described the four types of computing scenarios where cloud computing can optimally be applied:
The above definitions seem ok to me but there is (probably understandably) some overlap in usage cases. The "Growing Fast" case for start-ups is interesting and more of that later.
Mark handed over to David Chappell who gave his perspective on cloud platforms as they are today in the market. David was a very entertaining and knowledgeable speaker, despite wearing a dodgy suit (what happened to those trousers?!) and having a peculiar wide foot stance when speaking. Anyway I digress, on to what he said. David started by saying what the "Cloud" is comprised of:
David then explained that due to its ambiguity he disliked the usage of the term "Private Cloud" in the ongoing debate about publicly available cloud services (such as those provided my Amazon, Microsoft and Google) vs. private clouds deployed within private institutions. David said the main difference was that private clouds do not have the economics of public clouds (i.e. pay for what you use only when you need it). That point seemed straightforward, however I would have thought that with a large global organisation with many different departmental computing demands the economics of a private cloud would be similar to a public one.
David then went on to explain that there are two kinds of Cloud Platform:
David put forward that there has been only 5 major software technology platforms over the past 50 years:
He perceives that the Cloud is the 6th major software technology platform, and as such he is extremely enthusiastic about the opportunity and benefits that this presents to the whole of the software industry and its consumers.
David categorised Microsoft's cloud platform as (mostly) PaaS, which had three main components:
He then moved on to describe the main usage scenarios for Windows Azure, for applications that:
David said that in the fail quickly or scale quickly scenario, this was squarely aimed at technology start-ups where using Cloud technologies would effectively increase the frequency at which new ideas could be tried out at less economic cost if they go wrong, but are ready to scale massively if they become the new "Facebook" - so much so that many of the VCs in Silicon Valley are now insisting that start-ups use cloud technology as a condition of funding.
Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) was the first major commercial cloud platform, and David categorised this as IaaS, where effectively you get a Virtual Machine (VM) environment that provides a lot of control but requires more effort to control than an PaaS such as Azure.
David said that he was surprised that the Google App Engine, which has Python and now Java as its programming languages, did not come with any traditional relational storage (unlike most other cloud platforms) but on speaking with Google he found that the storage engine and the whole platform is again designed primarily for Web 2.0 apps and as such storage usage was more about retrieving photos, video etc and less about querying across many records.
David was very complimentary about the cloud platform from Salesforce.com called Force.com, He said that the sales pitch from Salesforce.com would be straight to business users, effectively saying that they could build scaleable, resilient applications without involving the IT department and without needing programming expertise. He asked the audience if anyone had used these tools and a few folks confirmed that they were extremely impressed by what the platform offered.
Bob Muglia (President, Server and Business Tools, Microsoft) then gave a quick talk on Microsoft's plans for Azure. He mentioned how Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, was based on several hundred thousand servers running in Azure, but only had a handful of operating staff in contrast with the usual economics (taken from Gartner) that usually 1 operations person was needed for every 50 servers. He emphasised that Microsoft was committed to the further development of "on premises" operating systems but that Microsoft was totally committed to cloud computing, its development and its support.
He said that some of the tools found in the Microsoft technology suite, such as SQL Reporting Services, are not yet available in the cloud on Azure/SQL Azure (due end of year though) - he said that he hoped that people understood that re-engineering an existing application for the cloud sometimes took time to ensure the scaleable and reliability demanded when providing the functionality through the cloud. The vision put forward by Bob for development of cloud applications seemed very compelling, with Microsoft aiming to make things such enabling resilience for a globally available cloud application as simple as ticking a check-box in Microsoft Visual Studio. He put forward that the major barrier to cloud adoption was the human aspect of trust of moving applications "off premises". He said that he saw a fundamental shift across all industries to cloud development and deployment, but added there may be some areas such as government and finance where this process takes a lot longer.
The event then switched to presentations by EasyJet, RiskMetrics and SeeTheDifference. The head of IT at EasyJet gave his pitch first. His department get an annual budget of 0.75% (small?) of turnover of £2.5bn (larger, so translating to £18.75m) and has around 60 people. He presented how EasyJet has taken an incremental approach to the adoption of cloud computing, utilising both "on-premises" and cloud ("off-premises") technology together (exposing end points of applications into the cloud at first). He advised this approach since it:
Dr Rob Fraser of RiskMetrics was next up. He explained whilst Moore's Law says that computing power doubles every 18 months, the calculations needed for risk management have doubled every six months. This has driven the need for parallel computing to meet this calculation need, and that RiskMetrics' RiskBurst service uses around 2,500 64-bit Opteron cores in their data centre but combines this with use of Azure to meet the peaks in calculation needed during each day (the similarities with power consumption management were pretty apparent). He said that average CPU consumption was around 18% of peak, hence a combination of both on and off premises compute power was a good solution for them. He mentioned that the management of this hybrid combination of technologies, and in particular being able to show real-time billing for it was a key area of investment for RiskMetrics.
The final presentation was by SeeTheDifference. The main point of this presentation was that this charitable organisation had zero permanent staff involved in IT, but regardless was able to deliver a very professional, reliable and scaleable website using external consultants to build on Azure.
Final section of the morning was a roundtable discussion with questions from the audience. The EasyJet guy said that the human mindset was key to the adoption of cloud computing. In terms of what keeps him awake at night was the thought that what would happen/how would attitudes change if any of the cloud infrastructure failed - so far it has experienced 100% up time. Rob of RiskMetrics was concerned about the stability of the platform, trying to ensuring that any changes introduced do not damage reliability. He added that he disagreed with Bob Muglia and thought that financial institutions would adopt public clouds quickly – he cited their experience of their revenues now being 90% based from service provision not on-premises applications. David said that he took some of the comments from Bob to indicate that Microsoft would also offer more of a pure VM (IaaS) soon in addition to the PaaS approach of Azure. David said that trust was the major issue in cloud adoption and he advised an incremental approach so "get your feet wet" then build from there.
On the whole the presentations were good and my knowledge of cloud technology has improved a bit - certainly it is fantastically appealing to develop globally available applications with no scaling, no resilience or data replication issues - it sounds too good to be true which generally means it is, so I guess there is much more work to do in gaining trust and acceptance for this technology. So my (pragmatic?) cynicism remains - but cloudy days are certainly coming and for a change maybe this is something to very much look forward to.
Xenomorph is the leading provider of analytics and data management solutions to the financial markets. Risk, trading, quant research and IT staff use Xenomorph’s TimeScape analytics and data management solution at investment banks, hedge funds and asset management institutions across the world’s main financial centres.
