SIA Technology Management Conference
Sell Side Pours Dollars Into Capacity, Connectivity | Market Data Needed--And Faster, Please | Hedge Fund Asset-Class Demands Raise Stakes for Servicers | SIA, BMA Quiet About Merger; Some Open Questions Remain | Matching People and Technology | Elsewhere in Town: Thain, Nazareth at the Big Board's Regulatory Show | Business Is Looking Up, Vendors Act Accordingly | Sybase: Can Breadth Trump Specialization? | Platform's Latest Version Goes Real-Time | Intel: Wanting to Be Noticed--Up to a Point | Smart Searches Find Their Way to Wall Street | Asset Manager Ixis Using Pyxis' mWholesaler | Vendors Combine Real-Time and Historical Analytics | Bracing for MiFID
Sybase: Can Breadth Trump Specialization?
June 19, 2006
Only a few technology companies are in
the class of database giant Sybase when it comes to spanning the
corporate enterprise software market. In common with the likes of
Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp., Sybase views financial services,
including a capital markets subset, as a vertical industry segment
important enough to have a dedicated team paying exclusive
attention to it. At Sybase, Eric Johnson, VP of financial services,
leads that effort.
There's no denying the applicability of Sybase technologies to the financial industry's considerable data management and integration challenges, from trade analytics and compliance to reference data and business continuity planning (BCP). Yet Sybase, because of its breadth, runs up against multiple competitors in its key product lines--many of them specializing in one given area of particular interest to financial firms. Johnson himself formerly worked for one of those specialists, Aleri Labs, one of the highly focused streaming data technology providers mentioned in the article on page 32.
Sybase's pitch to the financial marketplace, invoking the company's size and reputation as well as its product reach, is working, according to Johnson, a one-time yen options trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange who ran Sybase's European banks business from 1996 to 2002 and returned to Sybase in his current, New York-based position in August 2004 after stints with Aleri and webMethods. Securities Industry News editor in chief Jeffrey Kutler discussed that progress with Johnson as he was completing preparations for Sybase as a Securities Industry Association Technology Management Conference exhibitor this week.
What are your SIA conference messages? We have four main product headings: Sybase Risk Analytics Platform [RAP]; Sybase IQ, our querying database; Mirror Activator in the BCP space; and Avaki, our enterprise information integration [EII] on-demand data-integration solution.
Is RAP where you encounter a lot of niche competition? Yes, but this has grown a lot since last year. The product marries a historical query database, which is born out of Sybase IQ, with a real-time cache memory database with which you can support applications including algorithmic trading, real-time or near-real-time risk applications, pre-trade analytics and transaction cost research. Having worked at Aleri, I know a lot of the niche players--TimesTen, Vhayu Technologies, Kx Systems, etc.--and aside from the fact that TimesTen has been purchased by Oracle, Sybase is a bigger player with a product that doesn't require you to have proprietary [programming] language skills or be a Russian rocket scientist to figure out. We are easier to use and people already have the skill set. Sybase IQ, embedded in RAP, looks, smells and tastes like a relational database management system, the cache is relational, and as a company we have the size and support system to back it up. This idea was really born out of conversations with and direction from our customers, who on their own had combined our IQ product with in-memory databases for the solutions they needed.
How does that message go over, in terms of client acceptance? It's a new market that has really started to grow the last couple of years, and we've done very well getting the message across. We are always on the short list of vendor selection processes. Because of the competitive nature of this market, unfortunately, it's hard for us to talk about who is using our product.
