Conde: 'Users Need Bigger Software'

LAS VEGAS—At its annual user conference in Las Vegas late last month, SunGard president and CEO Cristóbal Conde gave a little glimpse into what the next chapter for SunGard will be like—at least the parts of the empire that serve the financial services realm.

The SunGard that will emerge from the split with Availability Services is likely to mirror what securities firm customers are doing, Conde says (DWT, Oct. 11). "It's in reaction to our customers who are breaking down silos within their organizations, and we have had to do the same," he says. The once-sacred practice of separate, autonomous trading desks is giving way to cross-asset trading at user firms, and they want solutions that make it easier for them to get there. "They themselves are breaking down what used to be many different little departments into large departments," Conde says. "These large departments have a need for bigger pieces of software, a broader scope."

The key to getting to these bigger pieces of software will be tighter integration among SunGard's financial offerings to major firms. SunGard Trading Systems has begun an outreach to the SunGard camps that serve the buy side, pitching the FIX protocol as one of the major unifying glues (DWT, Nov. 1). The Stockholm-based Front Capital Systems also intends to reach out and is hard at work on a services oriented architecture (SOA) that it will be happy to offer to other parts of SunGard, says Mats Lillienberg, CTO for Front. The vendor's flagship offering, Front Arena is a multi-asset class platform, targeted at the fixed income and interest rate derivatives markets. Front will be targeting the complex exotic options market through Front's acquisition of Derivatech (Trading Technology Week, April 5).

"We have created our own grid service on our enterprise service bus (ESB). We have implemented a service oriented architecture (SOA)," says Lillienberg. Front announced its SOA initiative—generally considered a collection of XML-based Web services that talk to each other and can be used in conjunction for complex transactions—at the SunGard Europa conference in Edinburgh this past summer (DWT, June 14).

Front has designed a service bus that is dependent upon the Java Message Service (JMS), and has selected the JMS-based Enterprise Messaging Service (EMS) from Tibco Software. Front also exploits the Tibco Hawk management software. The grid service is "something that we are introducing in Arena, version 2.2, in 2005," Lillienberg says.

The grid service framework lets clients link to the ESB, which will route jobs and tasks to hardware engines throughout the enterprise, Lillienberg says.

The SOA in conjunction with the ESB will help users of Front Arena by letting them create their own Arena-related services using the building blocks of Java, C++ and Microsoft .Net, Lillienberg says. Front also supports integration via Web services standards such as HTTP and the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). These services could yield application links to hardware clusters and computing grids.

Front has decided not to turn to a third party vendor to do the grid and SOA work. "It would be quite easy to integrate a third party, but we don't see any benefit to working with a third party. We are working with other SunGard companies—other SunGard companies are showing interest in this architecture," Lillienberg says.

As for the systems management piece, there are likely to be adapters in place to accommodate other systems management suites such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView and IBM Tivoli.

Why is there such a growing interest in SOAs? "This is something that's getting to be a standard," Lillienberg argues. "I know SOAs are going to make it in the financial services industry. Why should other SunGard companies have to develop their own SOAs?"

These internal efforts toward greater integration fly in the face of those industry observers who point to the big split as well as the sell off of the Brut ECN to Nasdaq (DWT, May 31) as evidence that the SunGard-to-come will be more of a holding company, willing to spin off parts for profitable sums.

Conde disputes the appraisal and denies that the future will be a series of fire sales of SunGard companies. "Perhaps [the holding company analogy] would have applied a lot more five years ago. But even then we were far more than an operating company," he says. Conde has executives in charge of the major groups and they the freedom to move quickly in response to the needs of the market.

"I'm bullish on technology. It's just that the nature of the bets—the nature of the investments—has changed to finely focused investments where the firm will put its entire weight behind it," Conde says.