Following the launch of its Reference Data Distribution (RDD) solution in July last year, PolarLake has signed its second big customer in the form of an unnamed global tier one investment bank. The bank is rolling out the solution as part of its revamp of its global reference data programme, which is focused on the distribution of standing settlement instructions (SSIs), counterparty, security master and corporate actions reference data.
John Randles, CEO PolarLake, explains the rationale behind the deal: “The client recognises the importance and complexity involved in distributing reference data within a global organisation. The choice to use specialised domain specific reference data distribution technology like PolarLake over extract, transform and load (ETL) or enterprise application integration (EAI) will mean they can now manage their reference data distribution in a very controlled manner.”
The bank selected the solution because of its pre-built interfaces, which allowed it a faster time to market, and the vendor’s domain specific knowledge of complex reference data integration projects, claims Randles. “This is a very significant deal in the industry with the clear recognition that reference data distribution is a key component to any enterprise data management (EDM) or data centralisation strategy,” he says.
“We also believe that the differentiators between a specialist product like PolarLake and the generic ETL/EAI technology for reference data distribution are clear. These differentiated features include reference data specific business analyst support, business operations support, pre-built industry standard interfaces and fast data streaming for batch and request reply processing,” he continues.
The solution garnered its first client in May this year in the form of the capital markets division of an unnamed European bank. That project involves the integration of multiple data streams and data types including trade, position, pricing and reference data into a group-wide financial data warehouse, according to Randles.
Also in May, PolarLake upgraded the RDD platform with the addition of grid computing capabilities to increase its scalability for downstream uses. The upgrade was aimed at allowing firms’ EDM platforms to support more than two or three downstream systems and taking away some of the complexity of a large scale rollout of RDD.
The addition of grid technology allows firms to deal with larger volumes of reference data at a faster speed, says the vendor. The solution also includes five new grid enabled features: distributed delivery agents, initial seeds, store and forward, resource optimisation and delivery agent’s dashboard.
