IBM’s announcement this week of plans to acquire Platform Computing vindicates our decision to include some Big Data discussion topics in our Data Management for Risk, Analytics & Valuations conference in London on October 17 – that’s next week.
Big Data has been dismissed in some quarters as just another buzzword. If another such one-time buzzword – Low Latency – is anything to go by, it could be one that’s around for a while. Point of fact: we launched Low-Latency.com back in 2007, and it’s going stronger than ever following our relaunch this summer.
IBM’s acquisition of Platform follows hot on the heels on its purchase of Algorithmics, and we don’t think the two moves are unrelated. Algorithmics – familiar to Risk-Technology.net readers as one of the leading providers of risk applications – will end up in the same IBM group as the former Cognos, providing that Business Intelligence group with an application set focused on the capital markets and risk management marketplace.
Platform is a serious provider of Big Data solutions. It has solutions for the MapReduce and Hadoop environments for unstructured data that could allow financial institutions to harness some of the information that’s heretofore been beyond the pale of their transaction processing or data warehousing capabilities. And that data could be fed into – or indeed derived from – applications like Algorithmics’.
As some of you know, we at A-Team have been doing a bit of research around the applicability of Big Data solutions to the capital markets area. That research is point to the fact that high-end analytics in general, and risk management in particular, are prime candidates for benefit from the opportunities Big Data might present.
That’s why I’ll be talking about how Big Data fits in the risk and analytics space at Monday’s DMRAV event, helped out by keynotes Amir Halfon of Oracle and Stuart Grant of Sybase. We’re hosting what promise to be some fascinating panel discussions, focusing on the regulatory requirement, the technology challenge, data integration for risk and the opportunities for high-compute analytics.
Speakers include representatives from institutions like BlackRock, BNY Mellon, British Bankers Association, HSBC Securities Services, Royal Bank of Scotland, Mizuho International and Royal Bank of Canada. And from innovative suppliers like FRS Global, FTEN, Hyper Rig, CubeLogic, DataFlux, SIX Telekurs, S&P Capital IQ and Thomson Reuters.
As our ongoing Big Data research shows, there are still many questions to be answered as to whether this emerging technology – whatever it truly is – will present technologists with a solution for the growing checklist of data management challenges within the financial enterprise. We hope to address some of them on Monday.
It’s not too late to sign up, so if you haven’t yet make sure you do here.
See you Monday.
