Profiles - Waters - January 31, 2008

Title: Tejpal Chadha
Feature:
Date: 31 January 2008

In the future, the only place you'll see a desktop PC will be in the Smithsonian.

Serial entrepreneur Tejpal Chadha's career spans a broad array of technology issues-from solving deeply technical hardware problems to providing the overarching software framework for hedge funds. That covers worldwide data access, latency, manipulation, storage and front-to-back trading technology, which integrates execution and order, portfolio and risk management in a broker-neutral, multi-asset, multi-currency, multi-strategy and global environment. His vendor firm, Nirvana, proposes to support the entire trading workflow of a hedge fund, whether in one locale or several global venues, so that the same data, processes and views are accessible from any location.

An electronics engineer graduate of ITT, India's most prestigious technical university, with an MS in computer engineering from the University of Michigan, Chadha began his career at IBM in the 1980s. He then joined Intel, where he helped develop the Pentium and Merced chips in the 1990s. A few years later, he founded and served as CTO of Gizmo to develop key microprocessor technology. Then, with his partner, Ken Williams, he pursued the concept of an Internet search engine geared for real-time financial market data and founded Vhayu Technologies. There, he developed Velocity, a patented software platform for tick processing and persistence that produces actionable information for making trading decisions in milliseconds.

As demand for real-time market data across asset classes reached staggering proportions, many sectors of the financial markets-exchanges, alternative trading systems (ATSes), buy side, sell side and even data vendors like Reuters-have used Velocity to capture and analyze at a high speed massive amounts of streaming, historical and proprietary data.

When asked to name a great technology of the past 15 years that was never adopted, Chadha responds quickly: "Optimark. Classic, so cool, the number of patents that they had, the number of problems that they solved, the amount of money that they raised. From a technology standpoint, the work that they did was phenomenal but it went nowhere."

In musing about why Optimark failed, Chadha guessed that it probably seized up over bureaucratic development and a business environment. "Compare that to Island," Chadha adds. "They kept their eye on the prize; their work was very simple and very good and they produced their matching engine quickly. It worked and it still works."

Chadha sees a future unfolding in just a couple of years, where T3 lines, desktop applications and PCs fade away. "Most of the power of a PC is already in a cell phone. Twenty-five years from now, the only place you'll be able to see a PC is in the Smithsonian. The deployment of compute power will be totally different," he predicts. The industry today is leveraging virtual private networks (VPNs) and private networks and soon will solve the bandwidth, latency, security and reliability issues of the Internet, he says. "Whether applications are server-based or grid-based, your front end is going to be a very lightweight browser that gives you access to data and processes anytime, anywhere," Chadha says.

-Maureen Callahan

Source:

© Incisive Media Investments Ltd 2007