I had the chance to spend some time with the CTO of a application house that delivers in to the HFT market last week. Most of the conversation was about issues that any medium to giant organisation faces, multiple sites across different continents. Supporting users' desktops, the necessity to reduce the capital & operational expenditure & still deliver the operational excellence to the business.
When the conversation turned to the specific issues of the HFT market, my host became more animated, obviously the fun part of the job. Writing code for demanding folks who don't accept compromises on performance keeps the design teams busy. Deploying & operating that code keeps the implementation teams even more busy & keeping the applications walking across the world leaves the service team is chasing the sun. The firm has to make some hard design decisions which are costly to work out in the event that they make the wrong call but taking long to take the decision is worse. A bad decision executed well is better than a pleasant decision executed badly. A year ago they committed to Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) expertise that would save their customers 30 microseconds, but costs a major project investment to bring to market as well as a year of elapsed time. You require being courageous to make the investment in the belief the market will require the solution, but wait long as well as a competitor will beat you.
It is not simple being innovative
According to my mate, the CTO, some top HFT specific issues are:
Long deployment cycles slowing the business. It can take weeks to build the infrastructure for a project. What they require is a flexible infrastructure that can shrink & grow to match the ebb & flow of projects. Cloud like resource management from a development house is what a firm needs.
Rapid expertise refresh cycles are necessary in the HFT market, but as servers get pulled out of the front line & pushed in to check, then development infrastructure, the write off period is a lot less than the standard years the accountants prefer.
Low latency networking & optimal application performance are driving them to make use of techniques that was time the reserve of the High Performance Computing folks. The firm is constantly looking for the next wave of innovation.
Keeping the staff in the firm has become an issue as their skills become increasingly valued in the market. way to think of it is a guerrilla promotion campaign-if there is more customer firms with friendly former colleagues working in them, the simpler it is to support & sell in to them. That does leave the shortfall in establishment as well as a constant recruitment cycle.
It is great to have these challenges. Working in a market that is growing & rewards innovation is not simple, but beats driving a train on the Circle Line!
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