Anyone has followed this blog for a while will know that I (and others) have charted the decline over recent years of the SIFMA Tech exhibition that takes place each June at the Hilton on 6th Avenue in New York. Take a look at this post from 2011, and then this one from 2012. I must admit that I was shocked to see the size of the exhibition this year, with two relatively small areas in direct contrast with the five soccer pitches of previous years filled with vendor stands, exhibits, lounges and bars.

Given this background it is with some surprise that I can say Xenomorph has had a really good SIFMA in terms of getting to speak to clients, potential clients and partners. It helped that people seem very interested in our TimeScape on the Windows Azure Cloud demos (more of which below), but I have no self-delusions that the fact that Microsoft had a large number of Microsoft Surface RT tablets to give away to clients and partners was a strong driver of attendance in our part of the exhibition hall. So it seems that it takes a lot more to persuade people to come to a fintech exhibition in these days of social media and online video (As a long time iPad fan, I was quite impressed by the Surface, the GUI is better than iOS but it still has a few flakey things that need addressing, not least of which that I think that I am not allowed to use my corporate ID with Skype but only my personal email ID – I just love these user policy decisions from on high…)

Xenomorph was on the Microsoft booth, demoing TimeScape running on the Windows Azure Cloud containing market and reference data from Interactive Data, Numerix pricing analytics and using the “visual landscapes” from our new partner Aqumin. There was a lot of interest shown in our example demos on Azure of performance attribution, correlation matrix calculation, spread curve analysis, option instrument and portfolio pricing analytics – I think the penny was beginning to drop for a number of people that none of the (relatively) complex analytics was going on locally and that they could access the analysis from anywhere on any device that had an internet connection i.e. without any software to install. I also didn’t hear so many people raise security concerns around cloud computing – maybe the pressure on operational costs in the market is driving some re-assessment of cloud computing? We also had a good panel discussion at the event with Microsoft and some of the above partners – as I was speaking I wasn’t able to take notes but broadly the Numerix event from last week will give you a feel for what was said.

Final thoughts go out to the Microsoft staff whose email addresses appeared in the SIFMA Tech literature – seeing some of the emails sent to them by people who wanted to get a free Surface but didn’t get one (because, for example, they couldn’t be bothered to actually come to the Microsoft booth…) are greatly revealing about human nature. There are still a lot of pushy people out there!