INSIDER

• Over and over again, Insider is seeing that firms can make a profit from the technologies they have nurtured, and in these times, many firms are looking hard and fast to do so. Instinet is about to be the latest to go this route. When Instinet Fixed Income (IFI) shuttered its doors in April, Instinet was left with some very state-of-the-art technology. (Insider remembers that Persistence Software, SpiritSoft and the IT team led by Duncan Johnston-Watt played major roles in the off-the-shelf aspects of the IFI platform). Apparently, it’s good enough to sell. "The technology--the application itself--I believe is still being vended or there’s a potential deal to sell it to some software company," says Andrew Banhidi, Instinet’s CTO, in a recent interview. "The hardware we’ve obviously re-used as much as possible. Same thing with the software they were using to develop stuff. They had WebLogic licenses, some Oracle licenses--we’ve tried to re-use those." As for the personnel, "some of the people have stayed at Instinet [but] quite a few of them didn’t," Banhidi adds. "The ones that have stayed tend to be in the infrastructure group because there were some people with extremely good DBA and SA skills. And, because a lot of the technologies that they were using were quite similar and complementary with what we’re doing with Newport, and what we’re doing with the middle office, they were good skills to have." Instinet declines to name the potential buyers for the technology or provide any further details, but Insider will definitely be keeping an eye on this space.