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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Curtis E. Bemis who wrote (2557)	12/13/1998 1:21:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 12823

Yup. And you're very welcome, Curtis. You note: >>You know there is much experience in the modern financial world with channel attached ip things into modern routers. I don't think I have to convince you of that. There are banking institutions that run on ip.<< So very true. Banks and brokerages (and the clearing and settlement institutions that serve them) have historically looked to the bigger houses for endorsements on techs for their own internal use. The following abstract from a January, 1998 BCR article demonstrates just such a dynamic, when the Securities Industry Automation Corp (SIAC, a quasi-private subsidiary of the NYSE and the ASE) decided to transform its ticker plant distribution architecture and other applications to TCP/IP during the latter part of 1997. I should note that several years prior to this I met with some of their officials during some "chalk talk" sessions at our offices, and discussed a similar architecture for their next gen purposes, based on ATM. Those drawings and speculative designs became a moot issue, and ultimatey died a quick death... until several years later when a similar framework was put to paper [pixels?], when the need for transformation was felt at a much higher pain threshold. By that time, IP had become a more suitable approach, no contest there [at the time], and so it goes. The legacy constraints faced by SIAC due to their already-in-place constructs were similar, but not quite the same, as those I've discussed with you earlier for the imaging apps. Enjoy, and Regards, Frank Coluccio =============== from: bcr.com Wall Street Takes Stock of IP Multicast January 1998, pp. 44-46 By A. Francis Bach (abach@siac.com), managing director of communications engineering planning and development with the Securities Industry Automation Corporation (SIAC) in New York City. The following is an abstract of the printed article. Throughout every business day, the Securities Industry Automation Corporation (SIAC) collects and distributes the trade and quote data that define the U.S. stock and options markets. This data has great commercial value to its recipients, but only for a short time. The recipients include the news media and wire services, the financial exchanges themselves (SIAC-distributed data are displayed on the trading floors), and various market data vendors who repackage the data with their own information and services for sale to banks, brokers and investors. Until recently, SIAC had been broadcasting the market data to its recipients using a combination of matrix switches, acting as packet replicators, and a unidirectional variant of the binary synchronous communications (bisync) protocol. This implementation had met SIAC's and its recipients' demanding standards for 20 years, but it could not be expected to keep pace much longer with the recent extreme growth in trading and consequent increase in market data. This article explains SIAC's unique data network requirements, and why we have replaced unidirectional bisync with IP multicast. Overall, SIAC's move from a low-speed, proprietary-protocol system to one based on modern, standards-based protocols is progressing well. Recipients are cutting over at a reasonable pace, without difficulty, and will be completed as early as 1Q98. So far, all recipients that have made the move have noted even fewer packet losses than they experienced with the old bisync system. The new system has also eliminated the rare delays that SIAC recipients occasionally experienced on very heavy trading days. SIAC's host computers are more than adequate to handle the current message volumes, and can be readily upgraded as needed to meet anticipated growth.