InformationWeek

July 6, 1998

Wall Street Middleware Group

By Alan Radding

everal Wall Street firms, led by Morgan Stanley & Co. and Goldman, Sachs, have formed a group to select middleware standards and establish best practices for the financial community--a clear indication that middleware is a strategic part of enterprise application development.

The Wall Street Middleware Working Group was formed in April to identify common needs among its members and to exert their collective influence over vendors and the future direction of products that will be used to build distributed financial applications.

"These are companies that normally compete with each other," says Barry Goss, VP of Persistence Software Inc., one of the middleware vendors involved in the effort. "But middleware issues are so important and complex, they decided much can be gained though cooperation."

Members of the group include Chase Manhattan Bank, Citicorp, First Boston, J.P. Morgan, Lehman

Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Salomon Brothers. Among the middleware vendors participating are Iona Technologies, Tibco, and Persistence. Consultants KPMG Consulting, Cambridge Technology Partners, and Giga Information Group are also active.

The group doesn't plan to create any new technical standards but will select from what's in use now. The group's middleware focus is strictly Corba. Members are concerned that vendor initiatives such as the Corba Object Transaction Service and Java RMI do not reflect their needs for high-performance systems.

At its April meeting, the group decided to create design patterns for object middleware applications that each member can implement in its own way. The group defined the middleware requirements for a pricing server that provides stock prices to traders. In June, vendors including Persistence, Orbix, and integrator MSB presented a pilot system. The pricing server used off-the-shelf components.

The group intends to publish position papers on middleware technology in an attempt to influence vendors and will share its views with standards bodies to ensure that new standards meet companies' requirements.

Illustration by John Bleck

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