Big Data for Finance

DDN Touts STAC Benchmark Performance

Storage vendor DataDirect Networks is pointing to new record benchmark results for financial analytics for its SFA12K-40 platform. The benchmark in question in the STAC-M3 suite, covering a number of operations on a time series of data.  DDN says its hybrid spinning disk and flash memory platform outperformed "traditional storage" by a factor of eight, and was nearly twice the performance of other flash storage.

Google Among 31 Vendors Interested in Building the CAT

Google is one of 31 information and technology vendors and exchanges that have expressed an interest in submitting formal bids to build the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT.  Formal bids must be made by April 25, with a decision on a winner due this summer, and with ratification of that taking place in December.

Q&A: Panopticon's Willem De Geer on (Big) Data Visualisation in Capital Markets

When discussing big data, the point is often made that deriving value from the data, through analytics, is where the real business win is. Panopticon Software has been in the analysis business - specifically data visualisation - since before big data was a common term. So we found out more about the company, and how it is involved in the capital markets, from its managing director, Willem De Geer.

Q: How did Panopticon Software get its start, and what is its focus?

A: Development of Panopticon visual analysis tools began in 1999 at an emerging market brokerage, Brunswick Direct. The CTO, Sam Giertz, was facing a difficult challenge: how to efficiently deliver quality information on thousands of financial instruments in over 30 markets in a very short period of time. Giertz wanted his clients to be able to make sense of huge volumes of information quickly and then be able to make informed investment decisions based on that information.

Q&A: Dell's Bob Barris on the ABCD of Big Data Analytics

Combining its server, storage and networking hardware with open source and partner software, and professional services, Dell is shaping up to be an IT heavyweight in the big data space.

We tapped Dell VP of sales for financial services Bob Barris to explain the company's offering, and he responded that it's as easy as ABC ... and D.

Q: Dell is transforming from a major hardware product company into one focused on delivering solutions.  How is it organised to address (a) the needs of financial markets participants (b) customers' big data initiatives, and (c) the convergence of the two?

A: Dell has a long history of activity in the financial markets going back to our very beginning in the 1980s.  Our hardware products, Dell servers, desktops and notebooks, have always had a prominent place on Wall Street.  However, more recently, Dell has transformed itself to an end-to-end technology provider, offering IT solutions designed to solve customer technology pain points based on various industry challenges.

Australia’s ASIC Taps First Derivatives Big Data Solution for Market Surveillance

The Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC)’s selection of First Derivatives’ Delta Stream+ Market Surveillance solution is aimed at giving the regulator the same kinds of tools available to high frequency traders for monitoring market activity and identifying possible fraudulent behaviour.

Big Data Bytes: Tervela/Cloudera, Mellanox/Teradata, MapR, Kx

More on big data in and for the fitech world ...

* Tervela's Turbo hardware-based messaging has been certified for integration with Cloudera's CDH4 Hadoop distribution.  Tervela brings reliable no-loss data capture, parallel loading of data to multiple clusters, and allows Hadoop to be readily used to transform data warehouse content from one format to another.

Kx Releases kdb+ 3.0 To Ease Management of Big Data

Kx Systems has released version 3.0 of its kdb+ database, improving performance and simplifying the storage of massive data sets, such as long histories of time series data.

Corvil Brings Big Data Analysis to Latency Management Appliance

Latency management specialist has released an upgraded appliance for latency management, leveraging the latest Intel microprocessors, and data compression techniques, to allow it to store up to 60 terabytes of tick price data, for analysis via built in and third party applications.

Q&A: Benchmark Solutions' Tim Grant on OTC Market Modeling with Big Data

Pricing and transparency in the OTC markets has been a key regulatory focus since the credit crisis of 2008.  But unlike exchange-based markets, data from OTC trading is high in volume, comes in many different formats, and from many different sources - big data in realtime.  Tim Grant, head of sales and marketing at Benchmark Solutions, describes how his company makes sense of it all.

Q: When was Benchmark Solutions founded, and what does it do that's new, and needed?

A: Benchmark Solutions was founded in 2009 by Jim Toffey (formerly the CEO and founder of Tradeweb) and is financially backed by venerable private equity house, Warburg Pincus.  The company was established to solve the long-time pricing and transparency problem in the OTC fixed income markets, becoming the world’s first provider of real time pricing for US dollar corporate bonds and credit default swaps.

Exegy Intoduces Journal and Replay For Tick Data Analysis

Ticker plant vendor Exegy has released its Journal and Replay system, designed to allow regulators, compliance groups, quants, and technicians to have access to raw tick-by tick data, time stamped to thethe nanosecond.