SunGard Bows Data Management Outsourcing Services for MAP Analytics

SunGard has begun offering data outsourcing services around its MarketMap Analytic Platform (MAP) market data and historical database system, to enable firms grappling with growing volumes of data to lower costs by outsourcing data management functions.

MAP—formerly Fame (Forecasting Analysis and Modeling Environment), which was acquired via SunGard’s 2003 purchase of Fame Information Systems (IMD, Dec. 8, 2003)—can already be hosted in SunGard’s datacenter in addition to traditional deployments within a client’s own infrastructure.

Now, the vendor is also offering server and application management and monitoring as a managed service for the underlying technology on which MAP is running—regardless of whether the platform is hosted or installed—as well as data management services, such as cleansing and normalization, says Oliver Muhr, chief operating officer of MarketMap Historical at SunGard.

Muhr says the outsourcing options will particularly appeal to larger firms with local installations of MAP that want to incorporate proprietary data into the platform, adding that the vendor can provide services such as data loading and management, as well as ensuring data integrity. “We provide services like how you deal with data cleansing, how you get different equity, fixed income or FX feeds, how you bring your proprietary data in, etc. This is exactly what we do already with all the global data sources we bring into MAP,” he adds.

Clients approached SunGard about providing the new services because they were looking to expand into global markets or new asset classes and were struggling to manage the growing market data volumes themselves, Muhr says.

“Their value is in creating something with the data, [such as] making investments and putting together portfolios, not cleaning data, getting data, maintaining data or normalizing data. They’re coming to us and asking us to give them the data in the form they want, via the applications they want,” he says. “Market data is still one of the biggest cost centers [for firms], and this lets them save costs, increasing the service levels to their customers of internal applications,” such as risk managers seeking to perform on-demand risk reporting, portfolio managers calculating daily attribution, and quantitative analysts back-testing trading strategies, he adds.

The vendor already has a business process outsourcing practice unrelated to market data—which provides banking functions such as tax processing to firms—and decided to translate this model into a service suitable for market data, to provide “data-management-as-a-service” to MAP clients. “We’re extending the value that we have from the product group on how to run solutions from a technology perspective, as well as good data management, and we can offer this as a service combined with how we provide our consulting and BPO practice at SunGard to our MAP customers,” Muhr says.