Thinking Out Cloud – Mass Customization and Market Data
First Published Wednesday, 14th April 2010 06:14 am from Xand : Joel York
The opinions expressed by this blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone, this does not reflect the opinion of Automated Trader or any employee thereof. Automated Trader is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied by this article.
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Henry Ford once said: "Any customer can have a car
painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black." Then,
in 1923 Alfred Sloan came along and cleaned his clock by offering
a tremendous variety in colors and models. But, Sloan didn't do
it one customer at a time. GM redesigned its manufacturing line
with the flexibility to produce a multitude of models and colors
without compromising the inherent economies-of-scale of Ford's
assembly line innovation-a practice that today has evolved into
the concepts of flexible manufacturing and href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_customization"
target="_blank" rel="nofollow">mass
customization.
src="http://xignite.web-services-blog.com/media/market-data-web-services.png"
alt="market data web service" />
What does
any of this have to do with cloud computing? And for that matter,
what does it have to do with financial market data? This is the
third post in a series called "Thinking Out Cloud" with the aim
of helping financial services and market data IT professionals
charged with developing cloud computing strategies separate the
cloud buzz from the cloud reality. This post explores the
important idea of mass customization in the cloud and its
relevance to market data management.
Mass
Customization and Market Data
According to
Wikipedia, href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_customization"
target="_blank" rel="nofollow">mass customization is
about providing "services to meet individual customer's
needs with near mass production efficiency" by offering a
"tremendous increase in variety and customization without a
corresponding increase in costs." Or rather, have it your way at
a cost you can afford. In the last installment in this series
entitled href="http://xignite.web-services-blog.com/2010/02/thinking-out-cloud-the-market-data-sweet-spot/"
target="_blank">Thinking Out Cloud - The Market Data Sweet
Spot, I pointed out that the best way to identify
market data that can benefit from cloud computing is to look for
data that is hard-to-use, hard-to-manage, and hard-to-access.
Mass customization on the cloud strikes at the core of the
"hard-to-use" problem by replacing inflexible data feeds and
files in static formats with financial Web services that allow
applications to select and consume highly customized market data
sets on the fly.
Mass Customization, Meta
Data and Web Services
In software, mass
customization is achieved by converting hard-coded application
functions into meta-data, so that the functional behavior of the
software can be controlled through data on an ad-hoc basis. For
example, the only real difference between this Xignite Wordpress
blog and a million other Wordpress blogs comes down to a few
theme files and the store of data that comprises the brilliant
blog posts within. The posts in turn get shuffled around the
Internet using RSS (really simple syndication). The href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html" target="_blank"
rel="nofollow">RSS standard lies at the heart of the
Web 2.0 revolution, powering the distribution of widely varied
content such as blogs, news, friends, tweets, music, video, etc.,
all because a few abstract meta-data elements like
"title", "description",
and "link" can be generalized to contain an
enormous and disparate variety of data. Swapping out this data
can literally change one blog to any other blog (or one friend to
any other friend!).
In cloud computing,
meta-data abstraction is realized through Web services (like
RSS). Web services take the concept of configurability through
meta-data abstraction to its natural limit, because every
operation of a Web service is inherently abstracted to meta-data
in the XML inputs and outputs of the API. For example, the
target="_blank">delayed stock quote Web service
allows applications to retrieve a single quote for a single
symbol, multiple quotes for multiple symbols, intraday
tick-by-tick prices, market volume and news, simply by varying
the Web service operation and the input parameters, i.e., the
meta data. Providing access to such a wide variety of information
in an ad-hoc fashion from a statically formatted feed or file is
simply not possible without lots of hardware, software and custom
development-most likely to create a Web
service.
Wrap it Up, I'll Take
It!
More plainly, market data Web
services are built for mass customization, because they cleanly
wrap the underlying market data and data management
infrastructure in meta-data enabling highly customized output
based on variable input. Therefore, applications that require
highly varied, ad-hoc market data subsets will be better served
by Web services over the static formats of data feeds and files.
Or, as we like to say at Xignite: "There's an op[eration] for
that!"
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