Last week’s formal introduction of PrimeOne Solutions, a hosted prime brokerage service within the CoreOne Technologies group, marks the end of the first wave of CoreOne development and the final resting place of Netik, the enterprise date management company that was acquired by private equity firm Symphony Technology Group in 2008 and rebranded as CoreOne Technologies in June 2012.
The transformation of Netik from an enterprise data management specialist to a data creation, aggregation and distribution company has been achieved under the tutelage of CoreOne CEO Rob Flatley, who was appointed by Symphony to take charge of Netik in April 2010.
Noting that the Netik brand was ageing, he dismantled the company and over the past two years has built up the CoreOne business model. At the end of what Flatley likes to call the first CoreOne implementation wave, the company includes three business divisions, but two more are in the making.
What is left of Netik resides in CoreOne’s VistaOne Solutions business, which combines Netik data management and CorrectNet data delivery technology acquired in May 2011 to offer hosted portals designed for firms wanting to automate data governance and entitlement. The third business operating under the CoreOne umbrella is DeltaOne Solutions, set up two years ago to manage and deliver global index and exchange traded funds data to trading and investment management firms.
While the disappearance of Netik suggests a move away from enterprise data management, Flatley insists that data management remains at the heart of CoreOne, albeit in a new guise. “We have exited the conversation about data management as people are still talking about the same things they talked about 10 years ago and have accomplished very little, but we have not exited data management. The front office doesn’t care about data management, but it does want solutions to solve business problems. VistaOne is a classic play here with data delivery and data management platforms being brought together and organised to deliver discrete solutions such as a Solvency II solution and capability to deliver investment data to Apple iPads,” he says.
With 400 customers across the group and towards 320 staff – about 100 of whom are ex-Netik and CorrectNet – Flatley expects to add, and name, a few more customers in the fourth quarter ahead of introducing two new business divisions. The first of these, which he describes as an analytics business around trading and valuations, is due to come on stream in the first quarter of next year, with the second following in the second quarter and offering regulatory reporting.
Both are based on CoreOne’s strategy of lifting technology platforms out of investment banks and repurposing them as hosted commercial systems. The end results will comprise between 20% and 25% of lifted technology components, with the remaining technology being built and integrated by CoreOne technologists. “You wouldn’t recognise the business now from what it was two years ago, everything has changed,” concludes Flatley.
