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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