Wall Street Opens Doors to Open Source Technologies

“With the financial meltdown eroding IT budgets, large
investment banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions have
been forced to rethink their attitudes toward open source
technology. Use of open source technology is quietly booming in the
capital markets because of increased cost pressures, and analysts
predict the current economic conditions will drive further industry
adoption.

“Financial services firms are taking a different look at open
source technology now that they are financially constrained,”
comments Lloyd Altman, a senior executive in Accenture’s capital
market’s practice. Altman and others suggest there is now a
corporate IT mandate to consider open source technologies as a way
to save money and reuse existing technologies.

“While banks and brokers have been running open source
applications in the back office, including Linux and the free
Apache Web servers, open source solutions now are finding their way
onto the front-office trading desk. “What the crisis has done is
shattered the orthodoxy in what is [accepted as the correct way to
build out systems, and it has allowed people to think more
creatively about how their software works,” comments Graham Miller,
co-founder and CEO of Marketcetera, an open source platform for
building automated trading systems.”

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