NEW YORK — April 25, 2007 — Bringing together business and technical leaders from financial services firms worldwide to preview the latest technologies on the Microsoft® platform, Microsoft Corp. today hosts its annual Financial Services Developer Conference.
The event, which runs April 25–26 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, will offer insight into Microsoft’s latest technologies, as well as best practices and real-world scenarios presented by Microsoft executives and industry leaders. This year’s conference is focused on the importance of user experience and security, and how both affect companies’ bottom line.
“The financial services technology landscape continues to be very complex at the top end, with many vendors providing a wide range of solutions and platforms,” said Jim Eckenrode, executive lead for financial services strategies and IT investments at TowerGroup. “This presents both challenges and opportunities for financial firms and vendors alike. Internal IT staff need training on new tools and development environments to maximize the flexibility of their technology infrastructure. Application vendors also need support to develop strategies and new capabilities to provide more solutions to their end-user clients. In either case, developer forums represent a way to address these challenges and maximize usability and growth opportunities for end-users and application providers alike.”
Launched five years ago, the Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference began as a small user group and has now grown to attract more than 700 registered attendees from 18 countries. The conference features three industry tracks (banking, capital markets and insurance), two technical tracks (developer and architect), and more than 40 sessions with live demos of Microsoft and partner products.
“Historically this conference has been our way of demonstrating how we’ve listened to the voice of financial services developers and architects to identify trends and define the changing face of the Web,” said Asli Bilgin, event organizer and .NET developer evangelist for the Financial Services Group at Microsoft. “This year we’re taking those concepts even further by offering direct access to enterprise developers and architects from some of the world’s largest financial services firms, talking about their own experiences and best practices as early adopters on the Microsoft platform.”
Keynotes and Other Session Highlights
Distinguished author and professor David Platt will be joined by Jim Payne, architect at Citigroup, and Brian Jackson, banking technology strategist for the Financial Services Group at Microsoft, to deliver the opening keynote address for the conference. With a focus on user experience, the keynote address will demonstrate a real-life, mission-critical system built by Citigroup. Presentations on banking, capital markets and insurance will follow, as well as other technology- and industry-related sessions, including these:
-
“Shaping the Future — Enhanced User Experience” focuses on the future influence of technologies that enable applications to serve as participants in a broader communication matrix to enable better collaboration among a variety of roles and professions.
-
“Time for Growth — Accelerated Business Development” focuses on innovation and the ability to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions in capital markets.
-
“Loan Origination Reference Architecture Pack Using Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server (MOSS) 2007 and BizTalk” outlines the new Microsoft Loan Origination Reference Architecture that was built using 2007 Microsoft Office system and BizTalk® technologies.
-
“Microsoft Insights — Application Performance Analysis & Optimization” provides insight into how to create applications that achieve high performance and availability in today’s fast-paced global environment.
-
“Writing Secure, Clean Code Using the Tools in Visual Studio® Team Suite (VSTS) Developer Edition” helps attendees learn how to leverage static and dynamic code analysis, profiling and developer tools in Visual Studio to write clean, secure and optimized code.
-
“Build Impressive Sites Using ASP.NET AJAX” focuses on how developers can quickly create Web sites with rich, responsive user interfaces and more efficient client-server communication by adding server controls to their pages.
-
“Microsoft Silverlight: More Than Just Eye Candy” reviews how Microsoft Silverlight™ (previously called Windows® Presentation Foundation Everywhere) facilitates the creation of stunning, cross-platform, cross-browser user experiences for the Web and beyond.
At the event, Windows in Financial Services magazine will honor five major development projects at leading financial services organizations. Tracy Issel, general manager for the U.S. Financial Services Group at Microsoft, will present awards to developers who have made use of Microsoft technology to solve practical business problems in financial services.
Microsoft Financial Services Developers Conference Sponsors
Platinum sponsors of this year’s event are Avanade, DataDirect Technologies, Digipede Technologies LLC, Platform Computing Inc., SoftArtisans Inc. and twentysix New York; Gold sponsors are F5 Networks Inc. and JNBridge LLC; and Silver sponsors are InnerWorkings, LogicLibrary, Palm Inc., Pyxis Mobile Inc., Syncfusion Inc. and Visual Numerics Inc.
More information about the fifth annual Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference is available online at http://www.financialdevelopers.com.
About Microsoft in Financial Services
Microsoft’s Financial Services Group provides software that helps financial firms transform the customer, employee and operations experience so they can maximize opportunities for increased market share and profitability. Microsoft software helps empower people and IT staff within financial firms — and across key focus areas such as advisor platforms, channel renewal, insurance value chain, enterprise risk management and compliance, and payments. Through a combination of Microsoft- and partner-provided solutions, customers enable their employees to turn data into insight, transform ideas into action and turn change into opportunity. More information about Microsoft’s Financial Services Group can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/financialservices.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
Note to editors: If you are interested in viewing additional information on Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft Web page at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass on Microsoft’s corporate information pages. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may since have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/contactpr.mspx.
