The sting in the tail of MiFID: IT infrastructure

In a few days (1st of November 2007) the MiFID will come into effect - and where are the firms standing at ? From what I have seen most of them are not ready. The effort has obviously been underestimated and, as this article in Bobsguide points out, the budgets that had been allocated to the task are way to small.

The budgets seem to be depending on "the state of its legacy systems and IT infrastructure. Firms that have a robust infrastructure, which has been designed to accommodate change and growth, and which enables interoperability between systems, will find it easier to achieve MiFID-compliance than those that have inadequate systems based on aging infrastructure with data trapped in multiple silos."

Seems to be obvious, although this observation seems to draw consequences for any data related change a company might have to face.