We recently discussed the ways server-based modelling software facilitates collaboration across boundaries. Another important boundary is the office wall, although what was once considered an impermeable divide between work and the rest of our lives, is nowadays all-too porous. For most of us, there is no shoring up the dam; work will continue to bleed into our social lives, so we might as well take some pleasure in those developments that remove some of the pain. 

So perhaps you're on a train - going to a party, or a family event, or in some other way in danger of having a life.  But then you realise you forgot to schedule some modelling. And you need a complex optimisation on a large annuity book. You wanted it to run…

Creating a good model from your experience data is not always straightforward. Data gathered over an extended time period, as financial portfolios usually are, will often incorporate artefacts from more than one administration system or servicing team, and it may require wide-ranging business experience to make the best analytical choices.

Perhaps for this reason, our clients often collaborate on modelling projects between offices and sometimes with external partners. At present, we know of one project involving analysts in both Canada and Bermuda, and another where the team spans no fewer than three organisations - two in France, and one in the UK. A server based approach makes such collaboration easier,…

Love them or loathe them, actuaries cannot get by without standard tables in some shape or form. Even when performing analysis of your own experience data to avoid basis risk, standard tables are often used as a kind of lingua franca between parties, a convenient way to express approximate results in a way everyone can understand.

The use of standard tables in experience analysis brings its own issues of course: Mortality moves on after a table is published, and even those that are not too outdated may still be innappropriate for the population under study. In any case the rates from a standard table will often require significant transformation in order to achieve something vaguely similar to your actual experience.…

If any doubt about Linux and Open Source technologies existed in Enterprise IT departments it must surely have been erased by last week's news: The London Stock Exchange, one of the engines that propelled the UK to the top of the World Economic Forum rankings, has invested in a Linux trading platform.

And this wasn't just a software deal. In the immortal words of Victor Kiam, the LSE liked it so much, they bought the company - MillenniumIT to be precise, a Sri Lankan-based developer of real-time trading systems. This transaction is expected to save the LSE £10 million per year.

This move has displaced a Microsoft .NET-based trading platform which had itself come in for much criticism in recent times. Whilst this shouldn't…

We were asked recently whether the rating reports from  mortalityrating.com could be extracted into a Microsoft Office format to use in an automated document production process. As the actual reports are in Adobe PDF format, tackling this question head-on wouldn't necessarily be easy. However, all the underlying rating results are available too, as XML (eXtensible Markup Language), and that makes meeting this objective pretty straightforward.

When we decided back in 2006 to represent all our calculation output in XML, it was principally a mechanism to deliver:

1. Decoupling / reduced dependency between software layers
2. A generic text output format for integration with other systems

So far, so good. But…

Not all security strategies need be as dramatic as those proposed by Mission Impossible, but anyone offering SaaS needs to ensure data is accessible by only authorised users.

One plank in any security strategy is encryption, the transformation of sensitive data into an unintelligible form. This scrambling of data is reversible only by those who have the appropriate key, or at least it should be.

One of the problems with encryption is that it is hard to make bulletproof. Algorithmic weakness and even the simple passage of time can transform an uncrackable cipher into a toy programming project.

For this reason, when the US Government needed a new encryption standard suitable for use by the NSA and the community…

A colleague of mine once described parallel processing as the "work of the devil". I don't know if I'd go quite this far - this statement was made in the early nineties, when technology was that little bit less advanced than it is today. It is undeniable however that dividing work efficiently, robustly and scalably over multiple processors has always been, and remains, a non-trivial task.

Parallel processing in a nutshell means performing program steps simultaneously instead of one after another (which is serial processing). To do this of course requires a platform with multiple CPUs, for which we have two major options:

1. Clustering - presenting one or more services from a collection of loosely coupled…

There remains some residual apprehension around open source software (OSS), despite the fact it is increasingly widely adopted.

However, such technologies can no longer be avoided, as Gartner announced at their open source summit:

By 2011, 80% of commercial software will contain significant amounts of open source code

Of course, it won't all happen in 2011 with a great thunderclap - the reality is, there is a huge investment in open source already:

• The internet runs on open source - from the most popular http server (Apache) to the fundamental infrastructure for DNS name resolution (BIND). If it wasn't for OSS we'd be living in a very different world
• Many commercial vendors including IBM, Sun and Oracle are active…

According to technology analysts Gartner:

... by 2011, one quarter of new business software will be delivered as a service.

They are calling it the SaaS explosion, and in the arena of the technology start-up, a landscape more recently acquainted with implosion than explosion, it is a very big deal indeed.

Software delivered as a service, is on the face of it a very simple concept. Gartner define it is software that is "owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers". Predominantly we are talking about web delivery of functionality that might once have been installed and managed on a local desktop or corporate server.

Despite the burgeoning growth, there exists uncertainty about the…