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Sanjib Sahoo, award-winning CTO at tradeMONSTER, was a featured keynote speaker and panelist at Computerworld’s Open Business Conference 2014 in San Francisco this week. Each year this event attracts the industry’s top strategists and connects delegates with those who build and deploy the newest open technology solutions. Sahoo’s keynote, titled “The New Reality: Mission Critical Open Source in the Enterprise,” detailed how open source was one of the driving factors for innovation at tradeMONSTER. By taking calculated risks and a “fail fast” approach, tradeMONSTER has minimized failure impact and created business value -- evident by its trading platform’s 99.99% uptime and number two online broker ranking by Barron’s.
Sahoo painted a picture of the mission critical nature of the online trading industry with some startling statistics on the amount of money traded daily across the US markets. “About $230 million flows in the blink of an eye,” said Sahoo. He illustrated why a technology system in this industry must be robust, scalable and agile, and referred back to historical outages and glitches of highly reputable financial firms that resulted in great losses. “When it comes to trading systems,” he said, “every millisecond counts. Users should always have continuous access to their accounts.”
tradeMONSTER built its mission critical trading platform primarily on open source and focused first on its core architecture. “Initially we chose open source because of cost, but stuck with it for flexibility, agility and control,” said Sahoo. tradeMONSTER’s architecture relies on scalable, modular, componentized design with not a single point of failure in the network, software or hardware. The company has survived flash crashes and volatilities, and it continues to empower the end user with device-agnostic online trading through innovations like mobile trading, streaming browser based trading and detachable windows.
Sahoo closed his presentation with key takeaways for the audience. He advised not to treat open source as a real open, but to use as a read-only instead -- especially in the context of mission critical systems. Contribution does not help mission critical apps as it makes version control or updates difficult. He did, however, encourage contributing for non-mission critical parts of code which use open source. “Extend rather than modify your codebase,” he said.
In addition, Sahoo recommended not to blindly update open source versions, as licenses and security can be fatal. A thorough testing of these updates is very important. He stated that while open source may be “free,” it is not without investment. He believes that it is important to invest in a talented and trained workforce.
Sahoo also added that open source provides flexibility for innovation and used tradeMONSTER as a prime example. While using open source, the company has been able to innovate quickly, test out ideas in a non-mission critical way and roll them out to customers faster. He encouraged companies to be open about deciding on open vs. closed source technology. There is no safe choice, only varying risks and rewards.
To conclude his keynote, Sahoo stated, “Open source is the new reality for mission critical enterprise,” and left the audience with a question: “If a trading system handling billions of data can be built using primarily open source, why not other systems?”
