How does a startup become an industry success?

Easy - demonstrate enterprise capability solving real business problems, integrate Microsoft’s latest product features and demonstrate success at Securities Industry Association conference.

This year I attended Securities Industry Association (SIA) annual forum in New York Hilton, June 20, 2006 – housing over 500 technology booths showcasing latest SOA applications and services.  The event draws a lot of attention due to capital market institutions and traders constantly looking for new ways to stay ahead of the game.  And the formula for this years game is; technology + time to market = profits.

In the world of equity trading and investments, the power of Microsoft was demonstrated by one of my top-tier emerging partner Digipede.  President & CEO John Powers team provide industry analysts and program traders several incredible real-time demonstrations of end-to-end Monty-Carlo portfolio calculation simulation using parallel HP clusters and common Office tools like Excel.

 

Stevan Vidich of Microsoft’s U.S. Financial Services Group worked closely with Digipede showcasing what promises to become one of the world’s most advanced modeling and trading platforms – the Microsoft Office Excel Services/Windows Compute Cluster Server solution. 

What has Digipede accomplished?  First they’ve integrated web-services features in Office 2007, delivered answer sets real-time to Excel Server and leveraged Compute Cluster Server (CCS) + Digipede .Net to deliver ultimate scalable parallel processing.

If you’re struggling with very complex Excel spreadsheet processing or .Net calculations and want real-time HPC performance, Digipede has the solution. 

With the combination of Digipede, launch of Windows Compute Cluster Server and, later in the calendar year, Excel 2007 and Excel Services, Microsoft has a competitive offering in financial services with compelling points of differentiation relative to Linux grids:

-          Leverage existing Windows OS, HW, and products Active Directory, Microsoft Operations Monitor etc.

-          Works with Office applications, .Net and Visual Studio Integrated Developer Environment.

-          Fully SOA enabled

-          Turnkey operation with Office 2007, Excel Server, and CCS

Microsoft as a team is working closely with Digipede Technologies to enable seamless programmatic integration between .NET applications and cluster resources, and with Platform Computing to make sure that Compute Cluster Server nodes can be integrated with existing Platform-managed grids.