Taking the ASP Model Seriously

After market data distribution platforms, the care and feeding of applications--internally developed or off-the-shelf--is the cause of a great many headaches among the IT staffs serving traders, especially on the big floors. Applications require care in the form of racks of servers, rows of temperamental PCs, a rat’s nest of networking and constant maintenance.

When firms were flush with cash, the solution was to throw more hardware at the problem and hope that would soothe the applications