Industry Leaders Highlight Data Management Challenges and Trends at Inaugural Enterprise Data Fabric (EDF) Forum

Bear Stearns, JPMorgan Chase, Wachovia, and TABB Group stress importance of an EDF to enable advanced data infrastructures

New York, February 21, 2006 - In an interactive panel discussion sponsored by GemStone Systems on February 8, a panel of experts provided insight into the distinct data management challenges facing the financial services industry, as well as new technologies available to combat these issues.  The four panelists for the inaugural EDF Forum were:  Buzz Moschetti, Chief Architecture Officer, Bear Stearns (NYSE: BSC); Robert J. Ortega, VP, IT Strategy and Architecture, Wachovia Corporate Investment Bank; Larry Tabb, Founder and CEO, TABB Group; and Peter Krey, Architect, JPMorgan Chase.  Shankar Iyer, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for GemStone Systems, moderated the panel. 

Recent technology trends have forced those in the financial arena to view infrastructure in a new light.  As market data volumes increase substantially and new compliance regulations such as Reg NMS and MiFiD impose significant challenges on the industry, firms must adopt a data infrastructure that can effectively manage intricate sources and streams of data in a distributed, scalable fashion. Data must be accessed, shared and distributed to multiple applications and processes instantaneously in order for firms to remain competitive and effectively support their customers.  Financial services organizations today require a solution that can simultaneously retrieve, manage and route critical market data in real-time, reducing latency while intelligently leveraging existing technology assets.  

“The adoption of algorithmic trading systems means trades are being made at almost the speed of light,” noted Larry Tabb, Founder and CEO, TABB Group. “To effectively leverage such systems requires data accessibility that operates at similar speeds.  Traditional data management systems cannot process information requests at such high speeds.  In order to achieve the necessary real-time operations, firms must employ a solution that provides a high speed, in memory data fabric to instantaneously integrate and route data from different systems and applications.”

Challenges created by disparate legacy systems and multiple data formats combined with the advent of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and grid computing can often lead to significant data bottlenecks and latency issues.  As more and more enterprises realize the benefits of de-coupling applications and reusing them as shared services, they must employ a data fabric that can virtualize data across applications, store data in-memory, and reconcile data with backend systems to ensure consistency and immediate availability to all applications.

“To remain competitive today, organizations must pursue a more advanced approach to data management,” said Shankar Iyer, EVP of Strategy and Marketing, GemStone Systems.  “An enterprise data fabric provides companies with the sophisticated, scalable and distributed data infrastructure required to quickly meet their strategic objectives, expanding with their business and significantly improving productivity and profitability.” 

About the EDF Forum

The EDF Forum, sponsored by GemStone Systems, provides the opportunity for industry leaders to gather and discuss the unique data management challenges within the financial services industry, as well as best practices and new technologies available to solve these issues.  The EDF Forum is a reoccurring event that will be held three times annually.  For future dates and locations please visit www.gemstone.com.

GemFire Enterprise

GemFire Enterprise provides a pervasive, distributed data fabric for highly available data-on-demand at memory speeds. The GemFire enterprise data fabric (EDF) operates seamlessly on multiple platforms in heterogeneous operating environments with universal language support, enabling data virtualization and transparency of data sources to the consuming applications. GemFire connects to databases, application stores, analytical tools, messaging systems, and mainframes, enabling the deployment of high-performance service-oriented architectures at significantly lower costs.