Buy-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Buy-Side Data Management Product—IHS Markit

In the best buy-side data management product category, Markit's Enterprise Data Management (EDM) solution is yet to be bested, and continues to dispatch challengers with apparent ease in what is arguably the most intensely competitive of all 32 categories on offer.

While IHS Markit occupies a leading position in the data management sector, it continues to add new clients each year; it currently boasts five of the largest asset management firms globally as clients and to date has a total client roster of some 200 names, 22 of which joined the provider over the past 12 months.

This year, IHS Markit made two significant changes to its data management service. The first was on the infrastructure front by enhancing the web-user interface with customizable dashboards and responsive layouts utilizing HTML5.

The second was to move data processing from a batched-based process to real-time processing. Performance has also been enhanced through the introduction of full in-memory and concurrent processing and a new matcher to normalize data.

Meanwhile, it also added new match capabilities, such as the use of more expansive rules, pattern-matching of names and addresses or issuers without IDs, and tolerance matching within a percentage match.

While IHS Markit occupies a leading position in the data management sector, it continues to add new clients each year; it currently boasts five of the largest asset management firms globally as clients and to date has a total client roster of some 200 names, 22 of which joined the provider over the past 12 months.

For next year, IHS Markit aspires to make EDM a core application to query and surface data, as the firm has seen a significant change over the years with respect to how users apply those particular datasets. EDM users are now starting to input a wider variety of data, such as investments, positions, transactions and even portfolio and fund data, rather than merely relying on reference data.

“What we’re looking at for 2017 is enabling our clients to better surface that data and use the data within EDM as opposed to passing it through the platform,” says Spiros Giannaros, global head of enterprise data management at IHS Markit.

Ultimately, the goal for EDM is to create a substantial and scalable ecosystem around data. “We recently launched a data warehouse, which gives people a structured time-series repository to better facilitate reporting,” Giannaros says. “The future now is satisfying an ecosystem of how you find data and data owners, and how you take the data and push it into systems to maximize its use.”