Data Management special report

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Expanding the data toolbox

There is an old saying that goes: "If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Basically, if you tie yourself to one approach, your results are going to be very limited at best.

In today's market, financial services firms are finding themselves having more in common with search engines, social media sites and national governments: they all need to manage and analyze exabytes and petabytes of data on a regular basis, but the trusty relational databases that they have relied on for so long are just not keeping up with their users' demands to manage "big data" these days.

Twin forces are driving the desire for improved data management and the enterprise scale. First, there are new ways to analyze structured and unstructured data that previously had not been collected in order to find new potential alpha, such as social media sentiment and other unstructured data. And second, there is the increasing demand from regulators that requires market participants provide more transparency around their transactions by providing more data to the regulators.

In this special report, Waters speaks with leading broker-dealers and vendors to discuss how firms can address these issues and what they would like to see in the next generation of data management tools, and touches on the best strategies to implement data integration and standardization.

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