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Sybase Offers Consolidated Source for Market Data
Dublin, Calif.-based Sybase, long a leader in supplying databases to Wall Street, is seeking to attract trading clients with the launch today of a comprehensive market data and analytics package that offers variable speeds to fit users’ needs.
Sybase RAP Trading Edition streams real-time market data with submillisecond latency, while transaction information moves at speeds ranging from sub-seconds to seconds and analytical data on disks can take minutes to reach applications. Sybase expects the platform will be used for high-performance quantitative analysis, real-time trade analytics, intraday risk analysis and regulatory-driven analytics.
The new product offers firms enterprisewide access to consolidated data across the trade life cycle, said Sinan Baskan, director of financial markets solutions at Sybase. Traders can view market data in real time and integrate it with trade, reference and historical market data for a particular application. The data can be used to price and trade or to test an execution strategy and then store the results.
“This is pretty innovative,” said Tom Price, senior analyst for capital markets at Needham, Mass.-based TowerGroup. “It offers the opportunity for one point of contact as opposed to having multiple solutions coming into a shop. It also takes into account the breakdown of the time criticality for different slices of information--milliseconds, seconds and minutes. They are introducing the ability to slice and dice the data depending on what you are going to do with it.”
“We treat the data in three different layers that are not dependent on one another,” said Baskan. “Through a streaming engine we pick up the live data and make it query-able at the rate it comes into the trading application. The trading system may then generate an order and determine an execution strategy. Data from the trading systems then goes into an in-memory relational database for queries and reporting.”
Though competitors handle pieces of this, Eric Johnson, SVP of financial services at Sybase, claims no other company has designed an infrastructure that works from a single homogeneous platform. Sybase has redesigned systems that traditionally have been provided in a collection of silos. Its main competition has been internal IT initiatives to link disparate in-house and vendor-supplied solutions.
Baskan said the Sybase application, which runs on servers using Linux or the Solaris operating system from Sun Microsystems, meets the demands created by the securities industry’s skyrocketing data volumes. Sybase RAP multicasts market data to the streaming engine and the database, which can store several hundred terabytes of data and keep it online for users.
Added Baskan: “We think you should be able to pick up the data and not capture it in one silo database and then try to move it with batch processes or messaging--keep it flowing and persist it several times during the trading cycle into a high-capacity database.”
The single-source model makes the data available to consuming applications faster than existing systems and also allows users to create integrated data sets for repricing risk and recalculation of Greeks several times during the day. It also allows for data aggregation that can be used for monitoring and reporting.
Data needs depend on the role of the user, said Johnson. While an analyst supporting algorithmic trading might want 30 days of data, Johnson said a technical analyst told him he’d like data going back to the Civil War if he could get it. Quants and risk managers at investment bank have overlapping needs, he noted, but require different amounts of data. Sybase is pursuing as customers banks, hedge funds, brokers, risk managers and compliance officers, he added.
Johnson noted that the product will help clients handle the requirements of Europe’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive and Regulation National Market System in the U.S., as well as “the new regulations that presumably will come along” after the credit crisis.
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