Oracle's Pearl Talks up Java for Trading Systems Development, Speed and Performance?

Oracle is focusing on building a Java-based pre-engineered trading bundle this year in order to facilitate fast deployment and “fewer moving parts” to deal with for its customers, explained Ian Pearl, global lead of the vendor’s Capital Markets business, to delegates at this week’s Business & Technology of Low-Latency Trading (BTLLT) event in London. This development is aimed at tackling the challenge of performance versus time to market in the low latency trading architecture space.

“If you build it fast, it often runs slowly,” said Pearl on the topic of the traditional outcome of fast deployment technologies. “You often have to sacrifice time to market for performance.” He suggested that, instead, Java-based applications and tools should be considered to facilitate both fast deployment and high performance. He said the Java enabled data grids and architectures on which trading infrastructures can be built could therefore provide more robust capabilities.

Pearl admitted, however, that it is often hard to quantify return on investment (ROI) on investment in deployment technology in real numbers. To illustrate one potential case of tangible ROI, he elaborated on the reduction in the time taken for hardware development via an Oracle implementation from six months down to two or three weeks.

As for whether the audience was convinced in the argument for a Java-based platform, Oracle will likely find out once it has launched the package later this year.