I read this blog article last night

http://wallstreettechdaily.com/2006/10/25/does-technology-takes-the-out-of-bond-trading/

and the article on the Globe

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20061025.RBONDS25/TPStory/Business

about how bond salesmen and traders are making less money due to technology advances. This is inevitable with all asset classes as they mature and I have witnessed this first hand in the CDS market

Originally, CDS spreads were sent out from the sell side to buy side over Bloomberg and it was very hard to work out who was offering what spread due to overload of information until quote parsers were introduced

http://www.creditma.com/

Before this some traders were getting 1000's of emails a day, each containing several quotes with each sell side, with each sell side having proprietary tickers for each entity. Even with these parsers, it was still hard to match entities as there was no uniform way of matching names to reference entities until Markit introduced RED Codes

http://www.markit.com/marketing/

Around 2 years ago, I noticed the first non-integer spreads being quoted - a sure sign that the spreads were tightening.

However, we are still at the point now where without products such as QuoteVision, it is difficult to find out what the market is doing intraday, as Markit spreads are currently end of day (they are currently testing an intra-day quote parser).  The market is still growing for these parsers, although I believe once Markit release their intra-day parser that integrates with their comprehensive reference database, it will be game over for the competition.

There are lots of trading platforms springing up, such as CreditEx

http://www.creditex.com/web/index.html

although these tend to be intra-broker, so don't help the buy side narrow their spreads, and some are index only, so don't allow single name trades.