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Technology testers

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At Hold Brothers On-Line Investment Services, new technology is essential to the small stock trading firm's survival. The New York company uses advanced trading software and a strong network infrastructure to remain competitive with behemoths such as Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

Chris Lukas kept the firm on the IT forefront in his former position as CTO for emerging technologies at Hold Brothers. "If there is going to be a position such as mine at a company, the company has to either be very receptive to new technology or in a start-up building mode," Lukas says.

Lukas says that when he worked for Hold Brothers the firm actively sought new technology, a refreshing change from past employers.

"With this industry being the fastest-changing industry of all, you would think that there would be more people receptive to new technology," Lukas says.

Some of the largest companies have the luxury of targeting certain technologies that might have business value and assigning evaluators to track that specific area.

One U.S. auto manufacturer runs an Advanced Technologies Research Group, which has a department of people looking at Linux and open source applications to save money and replace proprietary systems.

"Being in the Advanced Technology Research Group gives me leeway to do things that are not normally allowed," says a systems engineer at the automaker who wishes to remain anonymous. This engineer focuses on researching open source alternatives to mail, file and print serving. "I have my own Linux desktop, and I run a dozen servers of 'non-authorized' types in the lab."

At another large company, a Linux-focused technology exploration group has evolved into a full-fledged IT support and development group. "Linux is one of those technologies that provides that proverbial blank white sheet of paper," says Tim Golden, director of Linux design and engineering at Bank of America in Charlotte, N.C. While initially established as an exploratory group, his team now distributes packaged Linux and open source hardware/software bundles for various business units and offices throughout the company. The group is also the lead IT team for evaluating and testing how applications running on the bank's proprietary Unix platforms would port over to Linux/Intel platforms.

"We've had applications running a 70% load that we migrated to Linux [servers] in a lab and found that we could put an additional nine applications on [the box] once we were in production," Golden says.