Eagle Development Group Launches Accounting System For Fund Managers

HARTFORD, Conn.--Eagle Development Group introduced its Straight Through Accounting & Recordkeeping system, or STAR, a high-volume transaction processor that will handle back-office accounting for fund managers.

The system is a companion to Eagle's Portfolio Account Concentrating Engine, or PACE, data warehouse, which was introduced in 1997 (IMT, August 1, 1997). A license for STAR will typically run from $500,000 to $1 million, but the actual cost will depend upon several variables, including the number of users, accounts, securities held and total value of assets under management, says Kevin Sullivan, a managing partner with Eagle.

The product is in use at one beta site, which Sullivan could not identify. But the beta tester is running PACE on IBM RS/6000 32-processor servers running IBM's AIX Unix. But STAR can also be run on Sun Microsystems Solaris and Hewlett-Packard's HP/UX.

At the beta site, a proprietary application that ran on Pyramid Unix servers is being replaced. The Pyramid hardware and operating software had enough capacity, but the old application was not multithreading and could not take full use of their capacity.

What's more, the beta site wants its systems to conform to corporate standards, which are mostly IBM.

Sullivan says that STAR's multithreading capability spreads large transaction processing jobs across all the available CPUs on the system server. That permits large batch processing jobs that once took an entire shift overnight to be run in roughly 20 minutes.

STAR also makes use of an n-tier architecture, or a thin-client design. That delegates the business logic to the server and leaves the desktop with little more than an application's presentation layer.

Sullivan says n-tier application architectures are gaining in popularity because they require less bandwidth in a corporate wide-area network than standard client/server designs.

"Communications on a WAN can be slow with a client/server application," Sullivan says.

The STAR application can interface to any standard desktop computer or the Web. The system also does tax lot accounting, so shareholders and fund managers can see not just their holdings and current market values, but purchase price and gain or loss on the transaction.

Sullivan says STAR can also be integrated with Eagle's PACE in a fashion similar to SAP's Enterprise Resource Manager, which also incorporates both a database and a scaleable transaction processor and is widely used in heavy industries such as manufacturing.