News You Can Use: The SIFMA Technology Management Conference

Tuesday kicked off the beginning of the annual SIFMA Technology Management Conference at the Hilton Club in New York City. For those who don’t know, this conference hosted by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, last three days, and provides updates on emerging trends for technology and technology management.

I spent a lot of time in the exhibition rooms looking at what all the vendors had to offer, as well as talking to people about emerging technologies in financial services. Virtualization is the next big thing for Wall Street data centers. The bulk of the people at the conference were showing all types of virtualization applications tailored for financial services, promising to make your firm everything from highly organized, to environmentally green and faster than the speed of light to boot.

I spoke with Maria McLaughlin of Appro, a technology company exhibiting at the conference. She offered insight into the financial services technology marketplace, “supercomputing is a trend within financial services,” once thought just to be the computers of big laboratories, McLaughlin pointed out that the large firms are now looking toward high performance computing to manage their needs.

Seth Merrin of Liquidnet provided the opening keynote speech on electronic trading and how co-operation between traditionally competitive forces may just open up the industry to even greater capabilities and long term growth. Dark pools of liquidity anyone? The Sifma Tech conference is always all about granular techy detail.

No surprise was the overall lack of women. Speaking with the few that I came across milling around the booths, they were often hard pressed to identify senior women within their organizations. The men also found it difficult to list more than three. Sharon Rowlands from Thomson Financial was a prolific leader until recently but there are a few out there on the vendor side including Marianne Brown CEO of OMGEO and Stephanie DiMarco of Advent.

Last week we discussed the rise of women in CFO and CLO positions, why not include CIO/CTO as a possible option as well? Look out for our Top 10 women in technology article, on Wednesday, June 25th.