Wall Street is ready for Linux, and the penguin is storming

Source: Linux Magazine

Though nobody knew it at the time, it turns out that April 1, 2001 was an important date in the annals of the Linux operating system. That was the deadline (mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commissions) for equities markets and trading companies in the United States to switch from their centuries-old practice of trading shares in fractions of a dollar to a decimal-based trading system.

Aside from making things a little more tricky for day-traders, the decimalization of stock exchanges like the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) created one high-priced headache for IT departments, who not only had to deal with the conversion itself, but also had to cope with the massive increase in trading volume that came with the switch from listing shares in sixteenths to listing shares in cents.

As if 2001 hadn't been hard enough for finance industry IT managers: budgets had been slashed, and fee-based trading was adding complexity and sucking clock cycles from machine rooms, leaving IT managers to squeeze every last "flop" of productivity out of their networks.

These conditions were ideal for what UBS Warburg's Executive Director of IT Steve Russell calls "a perfect storm" in the financial industry. For Russell, that perfect storm blew into his organization in September 2001.

For years, Russell had been watching the performance of Intel systems creep up to the level of their RISC competitors, but by the fall of 2001, the price/performance advantage of Linux on Intel over Solaris on UltraSPARC -- a ten to one difference, according to Russell's calculations -- was too great to ignore.