Bear Stearns, The Tabb Group, IBM and GemStone Systems Identify Real-Time Data Management and Distribution as Key Growth Driver for Financial Markets

Breaking down technology and organizational silos is only the first step in improving data visibility

NEW YORK , March 30, 2005 - The financial services ecosystem continues to make dramatic changes, said experts at a DWT New York panel entitled, "Real-Time Data Management for Financial Markets". Driven partially by lower margins, trade volumes are taking on Moore 's Law equivalents, doubling every 18 months or less as trade sizes have decreased from an average of 1,500 shares per trade several years ago to just 400 shares per trade today. To cope with the increased volumes, most firms have added significant amounts of new hardware, built out service-oriented architectures or introduced a combination of both.

The results have often times been a mixed bag of successes and failures. Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) built on grid and distributed computing infrastructure have been successful in creating the groundwork for flexible networks that are able to handle multiple tasks without experiencing processing power bottlenecks. SOAs have also been useful in helping to break down the technological and organizational silos that been created over the past several decades of legacy computing.

However, the introduction of SOAs and grid computing networks also present many pitfalls. In what Buzz Moschetti, chief architecture officer, Bear Stearns, outlined as a "paradigm of change," organizations must account for the problems inherent in spreading resources over complex networks with many potential data pitfalls. These problems include data bottlenecks caused by repeated inquiries to a single information source, such as for authentication, and layered technologies that haven't been adequately integrated and cause data traffic jams.

In an example cited by Moschetti, Bear Stearns has introduced the data caching technology GemFire by GemStone Systems within its program trading and global clearing and settlement risk analytics group. The data caching technology acts as a data fabric sitting between the data source, such as a database, and the front-end applications. GemFire stores frequently accessed data, saving the information request from needing to travel all the way to the data source and back again to the front-end application.

As a result, the program trading group has seen volumes increase exponentially as traders gain improved access to data. While in the global clearing and settlement risk analytics group, Bear expects similar results to dramatically decrease the time needed to run critical batch reports.

As Larry Tabb with The Tabb Group noted, financial services organizations are entering an era in which high-frequency trading and analytics can no longer operate in siloed environments. In order to break down the walls that exist, financial services organizations must introduce new architectures that provide data transparency to each and every group.

The three panelists were: Buzz Moschetti, chief architecture officer, Bear Stearns, Larry Tabb, founder and CEO, The Tabb Group, and Kevin Pleiter, global grid solutions executive, financial services sector, IBM. The panel was moderated by Shankar Iyer, executive vice president, marketing and strategy for GemStone Systems.

About GemStone Systems, Inc.

GemStone Systems is a privately held infrastructure software company that provides data services solutions for enterprise business architects and data infrastructure managers that are building, enhancing or simplifying access, distribution, integration and management of information within and across the enterprise. Founded in 1982, and with over 200 installed customers, GemStone is recognized worldwide for its unique competency and patented technology in object management, virtual memory architectures, high-performance caching, and data distribution technologies.