Open-source on Wall Street

Wall Street and Technology reported in an article earlier this month that investment banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions are increasingly turning to open-source solutions for analysis and trading. It isn't just for cost reasons, either: the maturity of the open-source movement and the availability of cutting-edge technology first are also cited as factors. As our own Colin Magee quotes:

"People realize now that the open source project — which really has worldwide buy-in from top experts from whatever field — is perhaps a more secure and future-proof method of development than going with a proprietary vendor who can never keep with the worldwide community," says Colin Magee, VP sales and marketing at Revolution Computing, an open source predictive analytics platform for developing with R, the statistical modeling language.

Matt Asay at cnet News concurs:

Wall Street adoption has reached the point, in the words of senior Accenture executive Lloyd Altman, thatopen source has become a mandate for cash-strapped financial services firms tasked with doing more with less.

I've seen this in my own business: open-source applications are suddenly the less risky choice, given the need to get more for less.

But the more dramatic shift for Wall Street right now is that it is considering open-source alternatives for fundamental, industry-specific applications, applications like Marketcetera's open-source trading platform, which I've called "a lifeline to the hedge fund industry" because it enables the industry to become more efficient and more productive. REvolution Computing, Esper, and others are also benefiting from this shift.

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