We had a great time at the recent 10th Annual High Performance Computing Linux for Wall Street event in New York on April 8, 2013. This year's HPC conference focused on speed and cutting-edge advances in network visibility, analytics, and instrumentation. Some of the brightest minds in the financial services industry were in attendance to learn about and discuss the latest technology innovations that help financial trading firms gain a competitive edge.

I was fortunate to take part in a panel at this year's conference which discussed how the acquisition and monitoring of data can enable firms to manage risk and compliance in the enterprise. The panel was comprised of moderator Paul Jameson, Managing Director, Global Financial Services, Cisco Systems; Donal Byrne, CEO, Corvil; Jean Hill, Managing Director, Alvarez & Marsal; and Bruce Cooper, CTO of Liquid Holdings and COO of Green Mountain Analytics.

We covered a lot of information during the conference, but our panel discussion addressed these key topics:

• Challenges and approaches to establishing low latency at scale.
• Gaining and applying intelligence to optimize trade strategy execution through analytics and instrumentation.
• The evolving importance of programmability within the network and software defined networks evolution and application in high performance trading.

Attendees showed a great deal of interest when we spoke about how analytics data from the trading fabric can increase visibility and turn data into action. Industry participants were interested in learning that the success of our monitoring solutions is now being integrated into ecosystem partners such as Corvil. During our demos we were able to highlight High Performance Trading solution capabilities and in-turn, received great feedback in other ideas we can consider developing in the future.

While it is true that today's trading systems have become faster, it's important for us that we enable smarter trading. Initially, we wanted to launch the fastest monitoring switch in the market, but we've expanded that foundation to provide a better view of the network along with access to analytics that help investors make smarter, faster trading decisions. Since fabrics are getting larger, depending on the environment, there was interest by participants in a 'Trading Fabric-in-a-Box' solution.

Overall, the conference was a great success and I was glad to be part of several thought provoking discussions on key industry topics. I hope we were able to provide insight to Financial Markets industry leaders and share how Cisco is helping to enable High-Performance Trading. If you missed the discussion or couldn't attend, please listen to our panel discussion, Audio: Enabling Sustained Performance -Ultra Low Latency with Enhanced Analytics.

For additional information regarding this event and more themes from the conference, please take a look at my last blog post, where I highlighted a few details surrounding the Nexus 3548 with Algo Boost technology.