A Sign of the Times: Web 2.0 Coming to Wall Street
by Joe McKendrick
We already know that Wall Street loves Web 2.0 stuff — look at the valuations of companies such as Google, MySpace, Salesforce.com, and FaceBook (not publicly traded, but worth a lot).
But, interestingly, it appears Wall Street companies are beginning to employ Web 2.0 technologies in their own operations. Hence, the impetus behind the upcoming Web Tech 2.0 on Wall Street conference coming up in November. (Note the O’Reilly effect in action — it’s called “Web Tech 2.0,” not “Web 2.0″)
The event is being put on by the A-Team Group and Flagg Management, who also put on the Web Services/SOA on Wall Street and Linux/Open Source on Wall Street events every year.
According to the conference promoters, many of the heavyweights of Wall Street will be there. “Major firms including Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Wells Fargo, Jefferies, among others have Web 2.0 at work to reach new demographics and support new sales programs…. The major financial firms headquartered in New York will be there – Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Salomon Smith Barney/Citibank. All have Web 2.0 programs.”
The promoters also say they will be looking at the platform aspects of Web 2.0 as well as the communication enablers — mashups, SaaS, and scalable data centers are all on the preliminary agenda.
Proposed topics include “Software as a Service (SaaS) – will it work for financial applications?”; “Rich User Interface technology options – AJAX, Flex, JavaFX and Silverlight – for the financial markets”; “Webtop delivery – a fresh approach to the trader workstation?”; “Mashups as the new messaging middleware for financial markets business processing”; ” Scalable and On Demand datacenter architectures to support Web 2.0 and SaaS delivery to Wall Street.”
