Saturday, November 26, 2005

Overview of Oracle's Financial Services Offering

http://www.oracle.com/industries/financial_services/fin.svcs_feb05.pdf

Oracle Malaysia To Hold Technology Summit Next Week

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 25 (Bernama) -- Over 1,000 attendees are expected at Oracle Corporation Malaysia's Technology Summit at the Sunway Convention Centre on Nov 29, 2005.

Among them will be information technology (IT) professionals, software vendors and developers, database administrators, systems integrators, consultants, distributors and resellers.

Oracle said in a statement Friday that it would be leveraging on the event to update the local IT fraternity on the company's latest technologies, products and service offerings.

The summit, with the theme "Information Empowers", will feature keynote speakers from Oracle as well as leading IT companies like Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Sun Microsystems and IBM.

According to Oracle, the keynote speakers will discuss industry trends, challenges and solutions which leverage on the power of information to drive businesses to further success.

To provide a comprehensive overview of the latest Oracle technology offerings, the programme includes a variety of industry and technology tracks, it said.

The tracks will cover key areas such as analytics, security, infrastructure, content management, and major industries including communications, media, utilities, government, education, healthcare, manufacturing and financial services.

Oracle Fusion Middleware, one of the industry's leading middleware platform, will be unveiled locally for the first time at the event.

"This comprehensive middleware product family helps organisations achieve greater agility, make better-informed business decisions, and more easily integrate data and processes across disparate IT systems," said Oracle Malaysia's managing director V.R. Srivatsan.

The summit will also discuss how enterprises can manage their existing IT infrastructure at lower cost, improve manageability and gain better control over IT assets and resources, Oracle added.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Financial firms get ready for MiFID deadline

Directive requires significant investment in data storage
James Watson, Computing 02 Nov 2005

Sixty per cent of investment firms have started budgeting for technology projects in 2006 to prepare for the upcoming Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), according to research published this week.

This budgeting is occurring despite the fact that 80 per cent of those firms polled either do not have, or do not know if they have, a relevant compliance framework for the directive in place.

MiFID continues the process of creating a single European market for financial services, and will require investment firms to implement a number of changes in how they operate, such as keeping detailed information for up to five years on trades they have made.

For many companies, the directive will require significant investment in their ability to store, retain and analyse data.

But the MiFID Readiness Survey, produced by the MiFID Joint Working Group and sponsored by Standard & Poor’s, Oracle UK and BT Radianz, says just 20 per cent of respondents have a unified data storage strategy in place.

Not much time for preparation remains; although the regulations are not due to be completely finalised until March next year, the directive’s deadline is 30
April 2007.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Grids move mainstream with enterprise system deployments

by Cliff Saran
Monday 31 October 2005

Companies have started deploying grid technology to run business systems, according to analyst firm Quocirca. Its Grid Index survey, commissioned by Oracle, found growing demand for the technology.

Although grid technology has been used to speed up applications in oil and gas exploration, pharmaceutical research and mathematical...

... modelling in financial services, the study showed it was now being deployed for enterprise resource planning.

Peter Condon, technology solutions director at Oracle, said, "We are seeing considerable interest in grid technology."

The main reason for users deploying grid technology is to make better use of existing IT assets. According to Quocirca, businesses typically only achieve 29% IT utilisation on their IT assets.

Clive Longbottom, service director at Quocirca, said, "Based on the greater understanding and acceptance of how today's virtualisation technologies and service oriented architectures can help create a more flexible infrastructure, we are seeing broad acceptance that effectiveness and efficiencies can be obtained by underpinning this with grid computing."

Longbottom said there was no reason why grids could not be used to run SAP or Oracle enterprise software.

He added that grid technology was moving rapidly from niche scientific and financial applications to more mainstream roll-outs. However, users needed to develop a standard IT environment before implementing grids, Longbottom warned.

The study found users were increasingly building more consistency and reuse into corporate platforms. "Achieving this consistency is an important first step towards adopting more modern, flexible and dynamic infrastructure solutions such as grid computing," said Longbottom.

The research found that 47% of respondents had standardised their e-mail and collaboration systems and 43% had standard application server platform environments.

To implement a grid, Longbottom said users needed a flexible IT infrastructure that enabled servers to be provisioned easily. This meant using virtualisation technology for servers and storage.

The study showed users were investing in such technology. Longbottom said that by deploying virtualisation technology, using a service oriented approach to engineering applications, and running blade server hardware, users were establishing an infrastructure that could support grid computing.

New survey reveals more than two-thirds of sell-side investment firms are not ready for MiFID

London, 31 October 2005- A new research report, The MiFID Readiness Survey, produced by the MiFID Joint Working Group (JWG), reveals that more than two-thirds of investment firms surveyed do not have – or do not know if they have - a MiFID compliance framework in place.

Sponsored by Standard & Poor’s, Oracle UK and BT Radianz, the research, which canvassed the views of 35 London based investment houses, measures the state of readiness amongst these firms to meet the demands of MiFID. It also sets out to determine how these firms are seeking to address the technology hurdles posed by MiFID.

Key findings of the survey include:

- Almost half of the participants have started budgeting for MiFID technology projects in 2006; and 60 per cent of respondents have assigned full time staff to work on developing MiFID compliance frameworks.

- Despite the challenges posed by MiFID in terms of operational risk and continuous availability of service, 80 per cent of the participants in this survey do not know if they have a technology strategy in place appropriate for pre- and post-trade processing of shares traded outside the regulated markets.

- More than two-thirds of respondents are unsure how they are going to manage the pre- and post-trade data publishing obligations that are required by MiFID Articles 27 and 28.

This survey is the first that the MiFID JWG has undertaken. As the detail on MiFID becomes clearer, the JWG plans to roll out similar research amongst hedge funds, the Tier 2 & 3 broker/dealers and market participants across the EU.

MiFID, which now is expected to be transposed into national legislation and regulation by 31 January 2007, with the full implementation date now expected to be with effect from 1 November 2007, requires a broad level of organisational and business process transformation. The directive will apply to all investment firms operating in the EU and the EEA.

Commenting on these findings, Bob Fuller, Co Chair of the IT Subject Group of the MiFID JWG, said, "As awareness of MiFID gathers momentum, we felt that it was crucial to track investment firms’ readiness for MiFID. This research will help firms to compare their own state of readiness with their peers as well as provide us with valuable insights for our discussions with the European Commission and the FSA. The findings of our first survey demonstrate that getting ready for MiFID is far from ‘job done’ and the more one looks into the detail the more questions are raised as to what being ready really involves. However it is encouraging that firms are already thinking about the next steps by allocating resources to tackle the technology challenges posed by this directive."

Darren Purcell, Associate Director for European Securities Classifications at Standard & Poor’s, said, "The survey highlights instrument identifiers and the mapping issues that surround them as an obvious problem for companies complying with MiFID. As a leading provider of securities reference data, Standard & Poor's will use its experience in this field to listen and work with the industry to develop solutions to help firms fulfil their MiFID obligations."

Nigel Matthews, Head of Capital Markets at Oracle UK, pointed out that many investment firms will recognise MiFID as an opportunity to improve business performance and transparency. Mr Matthews added, "MiFID clearly creates new IT challenges particularly in respect of the increased information volumes and complexity of relationships, the enterprise-wide control of information auditability, integrity, quality and security, as well as increased complexity of information lifecycles. Oracle will be assisting these organisations with a coordinated, strategic approach to information management in order to protect existing IT investments, achieve sustainable compliance and secure competitive advantage."

Chris Pickles, Manager, Industry Relations at BT Radianz and Chairman of the MiFID JWG, said, “We recognise the pressure on the entire financial services industry to take a long hard look at how best to ensure that information flows efficiently among execution venues, data vendors and market participants in anticipation of the demands of MiFID. We are actively seeking to make our shared market infrastructure available as an industry enabler."