In line with the current trend in the vendor community towards launching software as a service (SaaS) versions of data management solutions, SunGard has decided to combine its Fame and MarketMap offerings under the banner of a new SaaS environment. The vendor has just integrated Exchange Data International’s (EDI) corporate actions data feed into MarketMap and this move is aimed at further strengthening SunGard’s overall data management portfolio by combining MarketMap and Fame’s respective data sources and infrastructures.
SunGard hopes that a more joined up approach to market will allow it to gain better traction in the tough data management market; a strategy that many other vendors have recently adopted. Other examples include SmartStream’s decision to move all of its solutions on to its TLM platform last year and Thomson Reuters’ recent restructuring under the Enterprise banner.
In a similar vein then, SunGard will offer both real-time solutions under the MarketMap brand in a SaaS environment. MarketMap is a market data, analysis and information services display terminal. Fame’s real-time solutions include global data feeds, components and alerts for consumption and integration with a range of applications. The SaaS model has also been popular within the vendor community due to its ability to offer customers lower costs and expedited implementation times.
According to SunGard, MarketMap’s feeds and other tools will help customers to improve efficiencies by offering easy integration into firms’ trading engines, Web portals, back-office systems and other applications. The terminal also provides usage monitoring to help control data costs, says the vendor.
This monitoring function should prove popular in the current climate of rationalisation of data feeds among firms under pressure to cut costs. Earlier this year, banking panellists at a reference data event in London, including David Berry, UBS exec in charge of market data sourcing and strategy, discussed how they were involved in a degree of labour and technology arbitrage in order to achieve greater efficiencies and savings. UBS for one has been engaged in an extensive review of its data feeds and much duplication has already been eliminated, according to Berry.
