Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Big Data Technology Provider to the Buy Side─OneMarketData

The financial services industry has been trying to wade its way through a deluge of data due to regulatory demands and decreasing costs of a overwhelming pool of data. Portfolio managers and traders hunger for more and better data as the hunt for alpha has become increasingly difficult in a market that has been slow to recover from the economic downturn that began in 2008.

If the goal of a Big Data provider is to capture, store and link disparate datasets under a common thread in order to create usable answers, OneMarketData's OneTick solution has established itself as the de facto offering, as it wins the inaugural award as the Best Big Data Technology Provider to the Buy Side.

OneTick combines complex-event processing (CEP)─another buzzword that has taken on greater importance in recent years─with tick data management, which allows firms to hunt for new pools of alpha. OneMarketData has locked in a dozen clients recently, including Campbell & Co., the oldest systematic commodity trading advisor (CTA) in the US and one of the largest CTAs in the world, a relationship that Waters covered in September.

Rob McBride, director of software and research operations at Campbell, told Waters that it had installed a tick data engine in 2004, but by 2011 it had grown ineffective as Campbell expanded its operations. After an exhaustive trial, Campbell chose to rip and replace its old system and go with OneTick. "We had another tick engine that we were an early adopter of, we got it in-house in 2004, and it was always clunky," McBride says. "So we had a lot of experience with tick databases, and when we started working with OneTick it just fell into place."