SS&C Unveils Servers for Handling Reference Data

Trade and portfolio management software provider SS&C Technologies has been quietly developing a pair of server products that can be used to manage data flows into its own applications and those of other application providers. The company is now marketing Pricing Server and Market Data Server alongside its existing Camra, Antares and Altair products.

According to SS&C European managing director Rob Leadley, the company developed the data servers in order to offer clients a standardized way of handling both pricing services and static descriptive data. The servers have been implemented at three sites and SS&C is now talking to existing customers about adding them. Pricing Server is used to accept and normalize real-time price updates, currently from Bloomberg, Reuters and Telekurs. Market Data Server handles ad hoc inquiries by connected applications to retrieve-driven sources of information, including end-of-day pricing and descriptive data. Both systems were developed as part of SS&C’s Enterprise Data and Process Management initiative. Martin Taylor, developement director in London, says the initiative resulted in the development of a component-based infrastructure that supports both servers. The infras-tructure deploys a centralized, rules-based scheduler and interacts with deployable DCOM agents to service four functional subsystems, of which Pricing Server and Market Data Server are two, alongside Corporate Actions Server, which is still under development, and Web Server. Pricing Server interfaces to both ‘push’- and ‘pull’-based data services. A rules processor ensures incoming data is normalized according to client requirements, offering functionality such as rounding and formatting for the appropriate output to applications. The scheduler allows users to programme the system to request data from pull-based services according to their requirements. Market Data Server uses a similar architecture to submit requests to data sources when needed by an application. The system currently supports an interface to the Open Bloomberg server. SS&C is planning to develop interfaces for Reuters’ Source/Sink Library, FT Interactive Data and Telekurs.