Reuters steals the EDM spotlight

Having just told you about HP's data warehousing capabilities, Gary Barr, head of enterprise data management (EDM), Reuters comes along and knocks all those assumptions on its head by claiming that "data warehousing" delivers relatively little value in the EDM space.

A late entrant to the EDM space, which has been dominated by vendors such as GoldenSource, SunGard and Cicada, Reuters used the opening of Sibos in Boston today to try and steal some of the thunder from the founding members of the EDM Council. According to Barr, the EDM Council in its earlier incarnation was not "totally representative" of the industry, and that now a major market data provider such as Reuters had joined, he anticipates that it will give the EDM market, which has suffered from a lack of real-world implementations, a much-needed boost.

Reuters differentiates itself from existing vendors in the EDM space, which Barr says are very much focused on pricier implementations ($5 million plus) geared towards top tier firms.

Reuters on the other hand, says Barr, are focusing on extending EDM to mid and lower tier firms at what it terms a more attractive pricing proposition including the provision of professional services, which it has partnered with Detica to provide, as well as offering a subscription pricing model that is attractive to tier 3 and 4 firms. "Hosting and outsourcing is going to be a big business over the next few years," says Barr, differentiating Reuters' offering in this space from managed reference data services which have enjoyed mixed success.

So what can Reuters bring to the EDM space that other vendors haven't? Well Barr highlights Reuters unique position as a market data provider, that also has a reference data platform and integration capabilities. According to Barr, integration, not data quality and governance is the key ingredient for making EDM implementations work.

Reuters also has 1200 existing customers via its RMDS footprint, which it hopes to migrate to its Enterprise Platform. One customer is already live on the new Reuters Enterprise Platform, which incorporates its real-time market data platform RMDS, its reference data system and what it calls its "Enterprise Integration Engine (REIE)", which Barr describes as the "intelligent glue" that allows firms to orchestrate the distribution of data to applications and their customers.

Reuters' Integration Engine contains both complex event processing and "bi-directional" business intelligence, and is based on technology it has licensed from a company called M35. Reuters also has native connectivity to three of the largest middleware providers - IBM, Tibco and BEA.

Irrespective of the application the client is using - Bloomberg, Reuters, Thomson - Barr says Reuters Enterprise Platform supports the distribution of data from point A to point B without the costs and inefficiencies of point-to-point integration.

Reuters enterprise platform embodies its vision that real-time market data and reference data will converge. "The platform provides the prospect of integrating the two (market and reference data)on the same platform," says Barr. So just as the market has demanded real-time streaming market data, Reuters believes reference and corporate actions data will move in the same direction.

I would like some 'intelligence' with my data

We all know that generally speaking, banks have done a pretty poor job of gleaning anything ‘intelligent’ from the vast reams of data they collate and store about their customers. There are various reasons for this. Despite the promise of customer relationship management technologies, they have fallen far short of user’s expectations, which has not been helped by the fact that in most major financial service firms, data resides in silos which are not well integrated.

But with certain parts of their business becoming commoditised, increased regulatory reporting requirements and banks looking to leverage information in a more meaningful ways in order to gain a competitive advantage, “business intelligence” has not only become the industry’s biggest bug bear, but also its most significant opportunity to deliver value added services that make it stand out from the crowd.

Recognising this opportunity, the data hardware vendors have tried to up their game and deliver that little something extra. Some like Sybase have bolted on complex event processing technologies on the front-end to support real-time analysis of trade, risk and reference data. Yet, while these solutions show significant promise, they are lacking in “real-life” implementations to ensure they do what they say on the tin.

HP is the latest data management vendor to make bold claims in the business intelligence and risk management space. Following its acquisition of Knightsbridge Solution Partners, a Chicago-based data management and large scale data warehousing solutions provider, Hewlett-Packard has beefed up its business intelligence division and developed a “data enablement” platform overlaid with a business intelligence application layer.

HP’s new data provisioning platform, Neoview provides a hardware and information management application layer to facilitate optimisation of business intelligence in “real-time” environments. Neoview is designed to be highly scalable (it is geared towards large data sets in the hundreds of terabytes) and to handle mixed workloads .

According to Geoffrey Burkholder, director, business intelligence solutions, HP Financial Services, its data provisioning creates a new approach to how data is sourced. Instead of sourcing data independently from the same place, it sources the data once and all the relevant pieces of data reside in the Neoview platform, to ensure that everyone is using the same data so that they can ensure high levels of data quality and governance, particularly for regulatory reporting.

These solutions are not for the faint hearted or light of pocket though. In a deal valued at $4.3 million HP announced today at Sibos in Boston that Dutch bank, Rabobank had selected HP Neoview to service its business intelligent needs

HP also announced the release of its new Enterprise Risk Management solution, which leverages the data provisioning capabilities of its Neoview platform. Its ERM solution is designed to addresses all three pillars of Basel II and compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, International Accounting Standards, anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer.

Given the transparency required by regulations such as SOX and IAS, Burkholder says HP’s ERM solution enables firms to ‘drill down’ into each piece of data so firms can more easily demonstrate to regulators what process the data went through to derive regulatory reports. For banks struggling with KYC requirements, which let’s face it is most firms, Burkholder says the data provisioning within Neoview means it is able to provide a “much better view of all data related to the customer.”

Well he would say that, but Burkholder is particularly confident about the capabilities enshrined within its new ERM solution as it draws not only on its own in-house expertise, including the Knightsbridge acquisition, but also includes input from a number of software collaborators including Quadrant’s data modelling capabilities, Informatica’s data integration tools and Microstrategy’s business intelligence and advanced dash board capabilities. Will be interesting to see if this makes HP a more serious contender in the business intelligence space