The top 10 mergers and acquisitions in the network industry in 2009 all cracked the billion-dollar barrier, and involved vendors in hardware, IT services, collaboration, storage, wireless infrastructure and other segments. IT behemoths such as Oracle, Cisco, Dell, HP, EMC and IBM were among the biggest spenders.

After a whole lot of angst, punditry and hand-wringing, we have finally arrived at the beginning of the moment of truth: The Supreme Court was scheduled to finally take up the issue of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and its very constitutionality on December 7.

Looking through the holidays into 2010 there are four clear priorities for risk management that cut across all tiers of financial institutions. Over the last year the pendulum has swung from the exotic to the pragmatic, from the chaotic to a new order within financial services. The four priorities for risk in 2010 can be derived from the word DATA. DATA can be broken down into data, analysis, transparency and accuracy.

A local credit union here in the Boston area recently announced the ability to deposit checks from the comfort of my home - in essence, branch capture for consumers. Being one who loves a technology challenge, I gathered the family around to show them this great new technology. Now, there was a pre-registration process that does take a few days that I had already completed, so now it was time to get down to business.

We've noted that data centers in many ways are the future of Wall Street firms. You cannot be successful without state-of-the-art data center services, which have been sprouting fast. Just look at Citigroup's much-publicized green data center efforts, PNC's big green wall, and HSBC's data center just outside Chicago.

What could this quote from the "Pogo" comic strip by Walt Kelly possible have to do with analytics and risk innovation? The battle that risk managers constantly fight is that risk analytics often brings diminishing returns. The major components of risk analytics are data, methodology and the business problem which the analysts are attempting to solve for. The enemy of analytic innovation is that as the usage frontiers of data and methodologies expand, the result is diminishing returns of predictive findings and solutions that can be implemented.

IT professionals asked to do more work for less pay and fewer benefits might be able to forgive their employers' financial choices, but industry watchers say high-tech workers won't soon forget being treated poorly during the most recent economic recession and will look to find other employment opportunities as soon as the recovery gets under way.

The tension between CIOs and CFOs within organizations is nothing new. People have been talking about this for years. In the Sarbanes-Oxley era, these tensions seemed to reach their boiling point, and then subside dramatically. But it still exists, apparently.

We've discussed the global microfinance trend a bit over at FierceFinance. It's been an idea that has slowly been working its magic in the developing world, where a small loan will go a long way. Now it's going mainstream here in the United States, as well.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a civil contempt complaint against an online check-writing service, saying the company continues to allow customers to create and e-mail checks without verification of their identities.

There's certainly been a lot of talk recently about cloud computing and the financial services industry. The great public cloud vendor Amazon was only too happy to talk up the idea for hedge fund managers recently. While the idea of public cloud computing may not sit well with a lot of financial services firms, the idea of private clouds and public-private hybrid clouds seem more palatable. Still, the transition is hardly in full swing.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have had opportunities to sit down and talk with risk management professionals from two perspectives; analysis and data.  From the analytical perspective, I spoke with risk management practitioners and, on the data side, it was data warehousing experts.  The question I posed was given the events of the last 18 months, what is the one issue that confronts you today in evolving your risk practices?

What exactly does risk management mean when it comes to banks and other financial institutions? There is no one answer really. The term carries a whole raft of connotations. 

During the credit crunch, risk management certainly meant management of portfolio risk and counterparty risk and any kind of risk that put banks at risk of an old-fashioned run. But risk also has a wider meaning: The kind of risk that most GRC practitioners think of--the R in GRC. And banks would be wise not to forgot about this aspect. A holistic view of risk is probably the wisest interpretation.

With the deadline for its $3 billion bid for video conferencing rival Tandberg approaching and reports swirling that it will drop its offer, Cisco is looking to define the debate in terms of risk and rewards. Acquiring Tandberg can help Cisco build up its video collaboration capabilities, but there are also risks involved, including trying to buy and integrate its first European company, according to a blog by Cisco executive Ned Hooper.

The antitrust suit that the state of New York filed against Intel Corp. today, coupled with previous antitrust actions and lawsuits targeting the chip maker, could give rivals like Advanced Micro Devices Inc. room to pick up some steam in the processor business.

It looks like the Supreme Court will begin its deliberation of "Free Enterprise Fund and Beckstead and Watts vs. the Public Company Accounting Board and the United States of America" on December 7. Barron's suggests that a decision would come about a month later, so mark your calendars because it will be interesting.

Before he founded Amazon, CEO Jeff Bezos, was a green Princeton graduate working on Wall Street. At hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co., he helped build "one of the most technically sophisticated quantitative hedge funds," his bio notes. At Bankers Trust, he led the development of computer systems that helped manage more than $250 billion in assets.

On the spectrum of Cisco Systems Inc.'s host of conferencing tools, TelePresence is by far the most real-life - and the most expensive.

At about $1,000 a day for an average deployment of special conference rooms, equipment, bandwidth and network infrastructure to make the systems work reliably, the high-end audiovisual service has been, since its exception, the domain of the global conglomerate looking to cut travel costs from headquarters to branch offices or key partners.

The 2009 AFP Annual Conference was held in San Francisco this year from October 4-7, and was a more subdued affair than last year, as you might expect given the state of the economy. There were fewer attendees (4,000, according to AFP), and fewer major announcements. In fact, the major topic of discussion, as far as payments was concerned, was business-to-business (B2B) electronic payments, one of those opportunities that, like micropayments and mobile payments, seems like it should be huge but never seems to quite get off the ground.

One of the region's quiet success stories, a closely held software developer with over $150 million in revenue, has gone to the private equity well for the first time - and drawn deeply.