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Technology Stocks : BORL: Time to BUY! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: shane forbes who wrote (9546)	3/22/1998 1:57:00 AM
From: TChai	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10836

"everyone in America has a chance to be the next Microsoft." quote from Joel Klein, antitrust regulator. Link to complete text below. Shane, In America, it's a bad idea to go up against any organization that has the word justice in its name. It looks like MS will be called to do just that this year. Also, I won't be surprised if the Fed and the States come out with a mandate for 100% pure Java for government contracts and procurements involving the use of Java. Whatever it takes, the big boys in Washington are going to level ( kick some asses in) the playing field, somewhat. seattletimes.com

To: shane forbes who wrote (9546)	3/24/1998 12:07:00 AM
From: shane forbes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10836

Short interest on BORL up 20% to 4.4 million. <eom>

To: shane forbes who wrote (9546)	3/24/1998 12:21:00 AM
From: shane forbes	Respond to of 10836

Java Story (from IBD) - Portability is important: ---- The chief information officer at Daiwa Securities America is a driving force behind Java . . . literally. Jeffry Borror is so into Java that the plates on his new Jaguar convertible read ''JAVA CAT.'' His commitment to the programming language created by Sun Microsystems Inc. caught the eye of one consulting firm, which tagged him as a CIO to watch. The firm, Gomez Advisors Inc. in Boston, says Borror's projects make him a technology leader who ''surmounts systemic and international boundaries through use of Internet computing technologies.'' IBD recently spoke with Borror about Daiwa's technology projects and his passion for Java. IBD: What's your major CIO challenge at Daiwa? Borror: We have many different systems running on disparate platforms. For example, we have a trading system for the government (securities) desk that is different from the trading system we have for the Japanese equity desk, foreign exchange, futures and options, and so on. At the same time, we have a collection of systems for the back-office processing of operations (like) accounting, credit, books and records. That collection of systems - while not quite as broad as the divergence of the front office - is still quite large. Somehow we have to get the information from the systems that are on the trading desks into the back-office processing. Because they are on heterogeneous platforms in different languages, this is quite difficult. The goal of that is straight-through processing, where you enter a transaction once and it flows through the various systems. IBD: What happens if the funneling of information from the front office to back doesn't go smoothly? Borror: If you don't have straight- through processing, you have duplicate or triplicate entry, which results in the possibility of manual errors. IBD: What are you doing to guard against such errors? Borror: We are using a particular type of middleware created by Active Software. We're using this middleware to build something we call the middle-office system. The middle-office system is designed to sit between the front- office systems and back-office systems, to act as a funnel. In doing so, it allows us to address certain problems and acts as a router for the transactions from the front to the back office. In that sense, we refer to it as an air traffic controller. It also keeps track of things it routes. It keeps a master transaction file as things pass by. One of the many things it enables us to do is extract data into a common format and feed to the back-office system as well as to the risk system. That is the most revolutionary thing we're doing here. IBD: Everyone on Wall Street has or wants a risk management system these days. What problems do you face in this area? Borror: It's true, the holy grail for management on Wall Street is risk management systems. In order to do risk management - whether it's market risk or credit risk -you have to extract data from these various systems and aggregate it and distill it into some kind of a risk engine so that management can determine their risk-adjusted return on capital. IBD: How do you overcome disparate systems that come with having offices and clients worldwide? Borror: It's common in all the firms I've worked for that the technology is driven normally by local business problems. It's rare that you'll find a worldwide technology strategy that's uniform across the different offices. Part of that is due to the way the firms are organized. Also, the securities that we trade here in New York are very different from the securities traded in Japan. It's not unusual to find that local groups solve local problems with software and hardware that was optimal for them. The network that connects everything is common, but very little else is. IBD: Is that where Java, which is designed to work on all platforms, comes in? Borror: That's one of the places, yes. There are several points that drive Java for us. First, it's just a better programming language for the types of problems we are trying to solve. As a language, it's not all that much different from C++, which is what most of Wall Street is using. (Java) is just a better C++ in certain technical ways. Second, Java was designed from the beginning to run on all major platforms. If you have several in-house platforms, you can write your systems in Java and know that any part of it can run on any of the systems. This is revolutionary. In the old world, you had to do generally whatever the platform you were going to run on supported. C and C++ gave you some portability, but Java gives you nearly complete portability. ----- Shane (Daiwa and BORL are buds.)