When do you plan on completing this BI project? I'm hellbent on doing it before the end of the year.

What's wrong with your current data warehouse? Just the structure of many of our databases makes it very difficult to correlate. If a relational purist were to look at this, he'd just shake his head and walk away. While I'm not looking for a purely relational model, I'm looking for something that makes it easier to lay analytical tools on top. We also want to get to a new level of granularity around the data that we collect on our clients' behavior. So we want to be able to accommodate new data related to our client behavior. The other thing is we're actually building a user activity bus, so that every user activity that occurs gets logged into our operational database. So we have to build out the bus and tie in applications so every time a user makes a request it gets published onto a message queue and then stored.

What other technologies are you hoping will help? I've got four data centers that are going to two over the next 12 to 18 months. There'll be excess hardware that I'll be able to leverage. Storage is an area that obviously we're looking at. Part of what we're trying to do there is rationalize it based on tiers, level of services. It used to be that firms -- Ameritrade included -- would buy the high-end and most expensive storage possible no matter whether you're storing e-mails or client-sensitive data on it. Our strategy is to have a more economical approach to our storage.

What are the storage technologies that will help you down that tiered road? We are interested in virtualization. We've not strayed far from the beaten path, and that's something we believe is one of two new areas we want to look at -- the other being voice over IP. But at this point it's too early to say what direction we're going to head.

What are the biggest security threats these days? If you look at what's worrisome, not just for me but for my peers particularly in this industry, it's security and the protection of our clients and their data and assets. If we lose that, we lose. The good news is we've done some amazing things to protect our perimeter. I'm confident that data, while it's in our data centers, is absolutely safe.