AGENDA:
* 6 p.m. -- Dinner is served!
* 6:10 p.m. -- opening remarks (Tom Diederich).
* 6:15 p.m. -- Talk 1 (Kevin): How In-Memory Computing Powers Next-Generation Trading.
* 7:00 p.m. -- Talk 2 (Akmal): Powering up banks and financial institutions with distributed systems
* 7:45 p.m. -- Mini-panel discussion with Kevin and Akmal.
* 7:58 p.m. Raffle drawings
* 8:05 p.m. Finis

Talk 1: (Kevin) Wall Street’s Big Banks Are Waging an All-Out Technological Arms Race. They are battling to control the $58 billion-a-year equities industry. Part of that story is the triumph technologies that are enabling Electronic trading operations to seize opportunities lasting only fractions of a second. The winners and losers are determined by how fast a trader can digest a market feed and place orders. That means reducing tick-to-trade – the time interval between receiving a market tick showing the opportunity to an algorithm and the buy/sell order being sent.

In his talk, Kevin will discuss the in-memory architectures that enabled him to build very fast, reliable, and scalable enterprise applications, but more importantly, enables him to build and maintain them easily and in an agile manner. The move towards in-memory computing was to meet ever-increasing demands on performance.

Kevin has been instrumental in seeing this shift unfold mostly through the adoption of in-memory architectures that tackle not just the data side of the equation, but also the messaging and processing side of applications. Breakthrough performance and reliability have been achieved with an in-memory equities platform delivering one million ‘Client to Market’ transactions per second (TPS) at < 10 microseconds ‘Client to Market’ latency, with no performance change, going from zero to peak traffic, and with zero data loss guaranteed. In-memory solutions, with its minimal hardware footprint, goes even further to reduce massive investments in capital equipment resulting in significant saving.
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Talk 2: (Akmal) In this talk, attendees will learn about the key capabilities and features of in-memory computing platforms that are important for financial applications -- including ACID compliance, SQL compatibility, persistence, replication, security, fault tolerance, fraud detection and more.

Akmal will also review two major use cases of Apache Ignite and GridGain -- as a caching layer in-between applications and existing relational and NoSQL databases to speed up response time and achieve scalability; and as a full-fledged distributed database with its own persistence layer.

Several Apache Ignite and GridGain deployments in financial services will be covered, as well as an architectural deep dive into an actual deployment at a leading bank in Eastern Europe.