Aim Software has released a new version of its flagship data management product Gain with extended facilities for golden copy management and new support for Windows Server 2008/Windows Vista.
The main drivers behind the upgrade were market and customer requests for new functionalities and to further reduce time to market for customer projects, says Martin Buchberger, head of marketing and sales at Aim Software. “A lot of the development was driven by explicit customer requests and joint specifications from our more than 110 reference installations that were transformed into core module extensions,” he explains. Gain 4.1 offers extensions to the golden copy platform, providing advanced data consolidation functionalities along with improved usability and an enhanced user interface, says the vendor. The new version is aimed at boosting the management of data quality by providing an extended audit trail, historicisation and error logging. “The new release reflects the growing demands of our clients. Based on the feedback of our customer base and our regular market research, we enhanced Gain with a number of new functionalities and further improved already existing features,” Buchberger says. “We put a strong emphasis on continuous product improvement, enabling our clients to optimise their data management processes and to provide them with an intuitive and future proof solution that can be implemented in only days or weeks,” he claims. The biggest challenges when developing the new version were the transformation of several customer requests into product enhancements and finding the common denominator for normalisation rules of the golden copy, explains Buchberger. Like previous versions, Gain 4.1 is a modular and aimed at small, medium and large financial institutions. However, new features include XML reports for searching, filtering and browsing in title bulletin reports, templates for the normalisation of main fields of major data feeds out of the box, support for Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008, and inventory management for the tracking and cost accounting of requests from several entities. The vendor has also attempted to extend the coverage of historicisation and its audit trail to allow users to track historical and modified data more easily. It has improved its corporate actions diary system and enhanced the deployment mechanism for the faster rollout of business logic. Lastly, it has made some data model enhancements in the area of baskets, holiday calendars, taxes, EUSD, funds, MiFID and corporate actions. According to Buchberger, one of the main improvements to the end user will be that as a result of the normalisation templates, there will be less of a need to involve the development department in the definition and implementation of normalisation rules. The data model enhancements mean that existing instrument types have been enhanced and new instrument types are now covered. The XML reports are more user friendly and do not require any development effort but install out-of-the-box, he adds. “Aim Software is a product centric company that focuses on reducing the implementation time rather than charging extensive service efforts. With version 4.1 and the extended pre-packaged functionality, we tried to further push the envelope in this direction,” he explains. “The objective of Gain is to reduce development efforts to 0-30% maximum, depending on the needs of the clients, which aims to be considerably below the average of Aim’s competition. This is supported by the large user base that helps to push further developments, which will be factored into standard software modules that can be booked by all user pool members,” Buchberger continues. “Gain 4.1 offers a new service oriented architecture (SOA) that can help to more easily plug in Gain into existing environments and to comply with technical standards in reference data management, for example WSDL, SOAP or XML.” According to the vendor, the latest version of Gain is scheduled to be rolled out in about 10 financial institutions in the second half of 2008.
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