Five-year plans are history. In this age of the nanosecond, all industries struggle just to keep up. Extreme growth in information flows has hit financial services especially hard, where trading volume has neither precedent nor apparent limit. Founded in 1953 with seven employees in one office, First Albany soon expanded significantly into both municipal and corporate capital markets, transforming itself during the 1980s into a national trading and finance presence. The company competes by being big enough to provide clients with all the products and services they need, yet small enough to offer superior personal services, including direct access to company expertise.
Technology forms a critical element in company strategy.
First Albany's single-minded dedication to clients requires an advanced technical infrastructure and flexible interfaces, so that customers can query and get their data in the form they find most usable. We're doing everything programmatically and quickly, structuring applications to serve data to meet particular customer requirements. More importantly, it could not provide a tenable growth path for the future. There was no architecture, no overarching design. Riedy needed a storage infrastructure that could change rapidly.