Data and its analysis has become an important economic battleground for many industries, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the financial industry. Regulation is mandating greater data transparency across firms and trading practices. The increase in automated trading and the continuing search for new trading opportunities has led to exponential increases in the amount of data that must be captured, cleaned, managed and analyzed within a financial institution. To give you some idea of the size of the problem, the Options Pricing Reporting Authority (OPRA) in the U.S. is anticipating trade volumes at peak levels of around one million messages per second by mid-2008. Real-time data processing and the ability to store it for historic analysis have become particular pressure points for many investment banks, asset managers and hedge funds.
Posted May 15, 2008