Boiled Sweets; Hand-Rolled Cigars and John McCain

  by Richard Muirhead | 11 Jun 2008 | Permalink |

Apparently the Wall Street technology budgets are in rude health, that is if the array of attention-grabbing gimicks at SIFMA today are anything to go by. Nintendo Wiis; iPod Touch; young ladies in Pink Fairy costumes and our very own Dave Kirby will be thrilled to hear that one messaging vendor featured a dragon boat’s worth of booth attendants resplendent in Tie-dye, trippy t-shirts. They stood out …but they were still not a patch on Dave’s tie-dye jumpsuit.

So…such great lengths become necessary when all four floors of the exhibition are packed with vendors touting their wares and you are one of innumerable messaging vendors who all seem to be 1 millisecond faster than each other. At that point perhaps it becomes more the battle of the brands than that of the technologies. Think of tennis for example…could you prove your game is better with Head than Dunlop…or does it just matter which racquet Federer uses?

Virtualisation was sprinkled around liberally also, from the likes of Sun, IBM, Novell and others. As long as it can resist being overshadowed…or at least out-shouted by the crescendo of interest in cloud computing (which I think it shall)… then I believe server virtualization’s finest year is yet to come.

With all of these complex gadgets to get working…and of course data centre technologies to string together effectively, I was chuffed to find nestling amongst the booths that of our friends at Consulting Portal, specialists in IT Service Management for Financial Services. Plenty of opportunity for them I would suspect.

The theme of relentless demand for more infrastructures was a recurring one. If data centres are constrained by space, cooling and perhaps latency, which will have a bigger impact on the surge in new builds? Tracking friends via GPS on Helios; Video Calling on the new consumer friendly iPhone; computationally intensive derivatives portfolio calculations…which will create the biggest strain? Have CFO’s accepted yet that the current acceleration in investment is not a blip…but the beginning of a trend?

Other noticeable themes were complex event processing; and I am not just referring to the adept networking of the regulars that make up the PR cognoscenti in the “SIFMA set”.

So, there I was propping up the bar meeting various journalistic characters that I fancied to be plucked from an Evelyn Waugh novel. That is until the bar opened and I was told that sitting there for 15 minutes without consuming alcohol was not doing my bit to support the US economy and I should move on.
But I was impressed by the number of people milling round the bar, taking it as clear evidence of frantic education and deal making or perhaps simply marketing budgets still bulging from the exuberant planning assumptions of 2008. Until that is out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a neatly turned out, silver haired gentleman, sweeping from a bank of brass-clad lifts and softly holding court to his entourage. The presumptive candidate and some might say now in the face of Barrack Obama’s rising tide of popularity, the presumptuous President: John McCain. What was striking was the relatively small number and indeed small stature of his group. That was until 25% of the “bar revelers” promptly switched off their secret-service earpieces and vanished into sweltering Sixth Avenue.

Today is to culminate in the parties. The largest, hosted by Sunguard, great sushi, lashings of sake …but be careful not to drop your guard. The most exclusive, hosted by the unlikely bed partners of Intel and Sun and featuring every successful executives favourite indulgence: hand rolled cigars. All of this nestling under a party theme of trade-processing power undiminished by prudent and conscientious data centre efficiency. A domani.