Hedge fund managers pride themselves on the use of complex trading strategies that produce mouth-watering returns and put the performance of their traditional, long-only cousins to shame.

Trading technology is vital to their business. It means they can harness opportunities they could never hope to capture by trading manually. Spending on software is set to grow exponentially as the hedge fund industry moves further into the mainstream. However, there is a small problem: there is no way the IT vendors can keep up.