Following its acquisition earlier this year of Fame Information Services, SunGard has unveiled a new corporate structure in the reference and market data area to accommodate its activities in securities administration and pricing services. The company has created a new group, SunGard Data Management Solutions, formed by the merger of Fame and SunGard Market Data Services, another operating unit originally built around the PowerPartner quotes business SunGard acquired from ADP a few years ago and two other operating units: Tradeline and EMS.
According to John Hyde, group CEO of SunGard Data Management Solutions, the new unit comprises three strands, each focusing on the various operations of the combined group. The new enterprise data management strand is headed by former Fame CEO Dale Richards and will focus on SunGard’s activities in the enterprise and reference data marketplace. The two other operating units within SunGard Data Management Solutions are energy, comprised of the former Fame energy solutions activities and headed by Ian Gordon, a former Fame executive, and financial, headed by Janet Crowley. One purpose of the Fame acquisition, Hyde says, was the intention to build a reference data utility to feed internal systems. As such, Hyde says the enterprise data group’s ReferencePoint reference data management platform will be integrated with SunGard’s core products, delivering cleansed data to the company’s broad suite of investment management, portfolio management and risk management software offerings. He says Richards’ group is also charged with enhancing the ReferencePoint product itself, and is working with another SunGard asset, Synapse, a rules-based tool for graphically mapping, validating and viewing data. Using Synapse, SunGard aims to enhance ReferencePoint’s work flow and front-end components, while establishing a common server architecture and set of baseline functions like security. New credibility Within the next couple of months, the development is expected to allow SunGard to launch an ASP-based version of its reference and enterprise data management platform. This capability will be used to service other SunGard products. The Fame acquisition, Hyde says, has given SunGard the credibility to launch such a capability, based on Fame’s 20 years of experience in building data loaders for its time-series data platform. It continues to add data loaders, establish validation and normalization procedures and achieve downstream systems integration, drawing on internal resources to complete what Hyde calls “the last mile” of development for the ASP product. As such, Hyde downplays talk of SunGard’s possible acquisition of Asset Control (Reference Data Review, June 2004), declining to comment on SunGard’s acquisition strategy, as per the company’s stated policy. SunGard’s release last month of version 3.0 of the ManagePoint engine represents the fruits of the internal work with Synapse. ManagePoint is the core data management engine at the heart of the ReferencePoint offering, and as such is responsible for all mapping, validation, enrichment and storage of reference and historical data. The new version of ManagePoint introduces a number of enhancements, according to SunGard. They include:
An enhanced ‘Data Maintenance Workbench’ that allows manipulation of mapping and validation exceptions, and the ability to authorize manual changes to the golden copy data. With the old PowerPartner quote terminal product sold to Reuters, SunGard continues to offer the PowerData Feed, PowerData End-of-Day service and Power Data Component solutions.
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