Efficacy and effectiveness of trading strategy lifespans are dropping, be they buried in a high-frequency trading algorithm or a long-term human trading based strategy. That’s a disturbing enough trend before considering that an increasing number of market participants are analyzing more information in greater depth to identify arbitrage opportunities or patterns that can generate profit.
A technological solution for increasing trading strategy lifespan to maximize all of that market research may not have been obvious during SAP’s press conference in San Francisco on Tuesday either, given the enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor’s focus on becoming the fastest-growing database company by 2015. But SAP executives at The Westin St. Francis outlined how the company plans to enhance its presence in the real-time analytics space -- and a lot of that has to do with SAP’s acquisition of Sybase.
Dynamic Duo
“We believe that ASE and HANA provide us an incredible opportunity to rethink real time in several mission critical industries, especially in the financial industry,” said Vishal Sikka (pictured), an SAP executive board member. “With Sybase, we have 28 years of delivering world-class database products.”
Of the world’s top 50 financial institutions, 46 run Sybase ASE. Some of these companies run tens of thousands of installations of the relational database system. That is in addition to real-time Big Data analytics and management with Sybase IQ server, and real-time data capture with Sybase Event Stream Processor (ESP).
And new technology has become available with SAP’s integration of Sybase -- a technology that is new to Sybase, SAP and the database world.
“We are very excited to bring together ASE and HANA to offer a new generation real-time paradigm to these businesses,” Sikka said. “The combination of the Complex Event Processing technology from Sybase, the EIM technology from Sybase and BusinessObjects, and HANA gives us an incredible opportunity to enable a real-time data integration ... from any source.”
That includes databases from IBM, Oracle and others.
Demonstration Derby
A live demonstration during the conference showcased real-time integration of Sybase technology with SAP’s in-memory computing platform HANA using data from a German stock exchange that processes between 15 million and 25 million transactions per day. Sybase CEP technology analyzed the streaming data against pre-programmed rules, and loaded the information into HANA, which graphically represented the results of 2.1 million updates per second (see graph). The user also drilled into individual companies’ daily histories without a cache.
It may seem as though SAP is really playing up HANA. That’s because it is.
Making the Upgrade
Though some technology media, such as PCWorld to GigaOm, were quick to characterize SAP’s three-year plan as overly ambitious, SAP is putting its money where its mouth is: backing up its goal with €250 million ($337 million) to help migrate legacy system users to HANA database systems, in addition to another €115 million ($155 million) to help startups and entrepreneurs develop real-time applications.
“SAP is a database company,” said Steve Lucas, SAP’s general manager for Database & Technology. “We are committed to making our customers wildly successful.”
The financial services industry is spending too much time and energy on deep-dive information analysis for so little mileage from their trading strategies. The unparalleled fusion of Sybase and SAP technology can help reverse this capital markets trend, and get it moving in the right direction.
Related Articles:
SAP Lays out Plans to Become Big Player in Databases, Mobile by Chris Kanaracus
SAP reveals database, mobile roadmaps through 2015 by Rachel King
Press Conference Video at SAP Newsroom
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