Sell-Side Technology Awards 2013: Best Infrastructure Provider to the Sell Side ─ IBM

Regulations like Basel III is forcing sell-side firms to adopt more rigorous and compute-intensive risk analytics, while big data continues to pile up, presenting challenges and opportunities for greater insight and trading profitability. Sell-side firms' existing infrastructure is naturally feeling the strain, which IBM is looking to exploit via its IBM Smarter Computing initiative, an IT computing infrastructure framework designed to replace legacy technology with pre-integrated tools for high performance and accuracy.

IBM's products include analytical applications, infrastructure management software like IBM Platform Symphony, a distributed file system in General Purpose File System, and servers in System x, Pureflex, and iDataplx. The company partners with other vendors to build trading, risk, treasury, and business-analytics applications, in addition to offering reference architectures for big data management.

"The IBM Platform Symphony product is unique in that it creates and manages a shared server infrastructure to support both compute and big data applications," says Peter Nichol, general manager of IBM Platform Computing. "Sell-side firms can use the same compute grid that they use to calculate CVA to run a Hadoop MapReduce application simultaneously. The IBM Platform Symphony workload and resource scheduler handles the scheduling and workload, optimizing time-to-results for both types of applications. By using the IBM Platform Symphony scheduler, we have seen a seven-times-plus improvement in performance as measured by the Statistical Workload Injector for MapReduce (SWIM) benchmark for real-world big data workloads."

Pre-deal CVA measures can identify risk-reducing trades and provide traders with a competitive pricing advantage, proactively pricing counterparty credit risk on a trade-by-trade basis, and in the context of the portfolio exposure, to a given counterparty.

Sell-side firms' existing infrastructure is naturally feeling the strain, which IBM is looking to exploit via its IBM Smarter Computing initiative, an IT computing infrastructure framework designed to replace legacy technology with pre-integrated tools for high performance and accuracy.

IBM REACTION

"Banks operate in challenging markets. To gain deeper insights and meet regulations, they are running more complex analytics with more data and they need the results fast. To do this, banks are looking for next-generation, more cost-effective infrastructure. We are honored to be named the best infrastructure provider to the sell side. IBM is known for its high-performance hardware, software, and world-class services. Top banks rely on our infrastructure software such as our IBM Platform Symphony grid software. With IBM Platform Symphony, banks can have one shared, efficient infrastructure to run Monte Carlo simulations, credit risk and CVA analytics, and increasingly, big data applications. Our clients gain scalability, simpler administration, and up to seven times or better performance."

Peter Nichol, general manager, IBM Platform Computing