So we've started blogging…

It's true. STAC has officially joined the 90's. Starting today, we're devoting a section of our website to blogs.

The first blog is by Jennifer Costley, a former Credit Suisse architect now spending some time on big data initiatives at STAC. Big data will certainly have its share of blogs on this site, and so will fast data, big compute, and other topics of interest to heads of technology and those responsible for system or data architecture, development, engineering, and operations.

Why start blogging now, you ask?

When we created STAC seven years ago, it was precisely to counter the deluge of opinions, claims, and counterclaims that were filling the tech blogosphere and other media. We didn't think more blogs would help. The hype around high-performance technology was filled with hyperbole, advocacy, and even advertising dressed up as independent research. We wanted STAC's voice to be different: independent, customer-driven, and empirical. Instead of bringing more opinions to the conversation, we brought data. While other technology analysts based their research on talk, we based ours on testing. We let the numbers speak for themselves.

Having mostly won that battle in the areas the STAC Benchmark Council has tackled (with customers routinely demanding vendors produce STAC Reports to back up their claims), we now see room for more independent voices on topics that aren't so easily measured. Financial technologists face many "soft" challenges, ranging from hard-to-quantify product requirements to human factors. They also need to track important business and technology trends. Blogs and other forums where these are discussed are largely outlets for vendor viewpoints (sometimes explicit, sometimes surreptitious). And technology blogs by actual practitioners are scarce (with their increasingly publicity-shy employers likely to keep it that way).

The mission for our blog space is to present vendor-neutral perspectives gleaned from work with financial firms, new technology, and industry-wide initiatives. This will not be a forum for product advocacy or vendor-specific viewpoints. Vendors are welcome to sponsor a link on a blog post in order to interest readers in hearing what they have to say. But the blog content will remain independent.

We hope you find these posts useful over time. If you have ideas for topics or ever feel that we're straying from our mission, please reach out and let one of us know.