Waters Rankings 2014: Best Enterprise Data Management Systems Provider — Bloomberg PolarLake

The third-party vendor community serving the capital markets has, over the years, witnessed numerous examples of small, specialist technology outfits acquired and subsumed by larger providers, only to be never heard of again, a phenomenon that both Bloomberg and PolarLake would have been cognizant of when the merger was announced—hence the new entity’s “arm’s-length” relationship with its parent and its total independence and autonomy from the mother ship in terms of its day-to-day running.

Over the years, Markit EDM, formerly known as Cadis, has dominated this category across all of Waters’ awards programs, although its hegemony is now being challenged by a number of providers, with Bloomberg PolarLake topping that list. Enterprise data management, the process by which firms integrate, share, store and retrieve data for both internal business processes and external communications and feeds, means different things to different firms, depending on their underlying technology stacks, the complexity of their respective businesses, and the extent of their data management and integration requirements. However, there is one constant: The efficiency of firms’ data management processes has a direct bearing on their operational resilience and effectiveness, and it is in this realm that Bloomberg PolarLake shines. Bloomberg PolarLake is an EDM managed service that centrally acquires, manages and distributes reference, ratings, pricing, entity, index, corporate actions, and trade data, allowing user firms to more easily understand the meaning and context of such content, and by so doing, make more judicious business decisions, irrespective of the operating unit involved.