Big Data for Finance

Tibco Boosts Streaming Analytics Capability with StreamBase Acquisition

Tibco Software's acquisition of StreamBase Systems adds high performance streaming analytics to its arsenal of messaging and analytics products, furthering its capability to support "big data in motion" use cases.

Q&A: ScaleOut Software's Dave Brinker on Scaling In-Memory for Big Data Financial Applications

In-memory technology is finding new applications in the financial markets and in big data processing. We found out how ScaleOut Software is addressing these needs from the company's COO Dave Brinker.

Q: How did ScaleOut Software get started - what's in the name and what is its focus?

A: ScaleOut Software was founded by William Bain after he left Microsoft and first product was shipped in January 2005. He saw that applications running on server farms were encountering increased workloads that slowed application response times. Simply adding servers did not improve performance because data access bottlenecks, such as central database storage, were slowing performance. Storing data on each server didn’t help either since load balanced servers require uniform access to data that might be on another server.

Solace Boosts Messaging Appliance Throughput to 1.7PB/Day

Messaging specialist Solace Systems has introduced new network acceleration blades for its 3260 messaging appliance, capable of 40 gigabits/second bi-directional data transfer.  That adds up, says the company, to a 80 gigabits/second total transfer rate, or 1.7 petabytes per day.

Solace's new offering is addressing the growing need to support "big data in motion" - the process of transferring large volumes of data from one host to another.  "Building the infrastructure to intelligently route big data by horizontally scaling software is expensive and inefficient so companies see significant savings by vertically scaling within the footprint of their Solace appliances," says Solace CTO Shawn McAllister.

Contextualising Your Data

By Simon Smith, Granger Smith Consulting
www.grangersmithconsulting.com 

The ever growing amount of digital data available poses a real challenge to current search solutions, because they could potentially lack relevance, timeliness and adaptability. BI systems have traditionally focused upon structured data, for example; costs, margins and sales, and it is now becoming essential for a reporting tool to provide unstructured data and for both sets of data to be integrated.

Big Data Bytes: Xenomorph, 1010Data, Arialytics, Teradata, IBM

The latest from the big data meets fitech world ...

* Xenomorph's TimeScape analytics and data management platform can now leverage Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud, leveraging Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. Says Xenomorph CEO Brian Sentance: "Some of our clients have followed the pattern of successful on-premise deployment and once this business logic is production proven, they then want to move it offsite. This new capability for TimeScape is a direct response to that need."

* 1010Data has released version 6 of its cloud analytics platform.  Included are improvements to the company's Trillion Row Spreadsheet interface, faster importing of data, more advanced in-database analytics and machine learning functions.

* Arialytics has introduced its Aria platform, a big data processing and predictive analytics system aimed at the investment research function.  Data cleansing functions are built in to ensure that analytics product optimum results for investment, hedging or risk strategies.

* Teradata has introduced Teradata Intelligent Memory, adding in-memory functionality to its data warehouse products. The technology assesses the 'heat' of data - how often it is accessed - to keep just the 'hot' data in memory. Teradata reckons that 90% of queries are directed to just 20% of datasets.

* IBM has introduced IBM InfoSphere BigInsights Enterprise Edition V2.1, incorporating a Big SQL interface for accessing Hadoop, and also allows the General Parallel File System to be used as an alternative to HDFS.

BNY Mellon Report Explores Big Data in Finance, in the 21st Century

A report recently published by BNY Mellon - it's available to anyone who request it from them - takes a look at big data, its definition and its potential, and "sketches its transformational influence on the 21st century global financial system, mainly from an asset management perspective."

Wipro Pumps $30 Million Into Opera Solutions

Indian IT heavyweight Wipro has invested $30 million in New Jersey-based predictive analytics specialist Opera Solutions. It's unclear what this values Opera at, but Wipro's investment is a minority stake.

MPPs in Play: Actian Grabs ParAccel; EMC Launches Pivotal

The world of massively parallel processing (MPP) databases just got more interesting with Actian's acquisition of ParAccel, and the formal launch of EMC's Pivotal offspring, which draws heavily on the capabilities of the company's Greenplum unit and its MPP database.

MemSQL Ships Distributed In-Memory Database

Following up on its unveiling in June of last year, San Francisco-based MemSQL has released a distributed version of its eponymous in-memory database, aimed at introducing big data scalability to the low latency performance provided by the initial release.

Continuum Analytics Provides Python Insight into Thomson Reuters Databases

Continuum Analytics is providing access to Thomson Reuters' QADirect data offering via Wakari, its browser-based Python data analytics platform. Python is an open source computer language that was first released in 1991, and which has grown in popularity in part because of its emphasis on code readability and compactness. A number of financial markets participants are known to be using or evaluating it.