The financial services industry is reeling under the combined problems of unprecedented volatility, dramatically increased risk, and the exponential growth in market data volume and velocity, a Tower Group researcher, Dushyant Shahrawat, told analysts attending a launch event for Sybase RAP—The Trading Edition with Time Series at the New York Stock Exchange last month.

Shahrawat said that challenges in risk management, analytics and modeling and trade execution demanded more from IT systems than they were designed to deliver. The next generation of infrastructure will need to combine processing power, be able to process time series data, and be able to perform complex analysis in real-time.

He was addressing a crowd of more than 150 customers, analysts and financial services industry professionals who gathered at the NYSE to hear how Sybase’s hot new product for real-time trading and risk analytics will perform when it is released in early Q3.

An earlier version of RAP—The Trading Edition, launched at the same venue a year ago in the middle of the Wall Street credit crisis, was snapped up by 26 major financial services industry players with a strong pipeline of customers in prospect for future purchases.

Sybase Chief Marketing Officer Dr. Raj Nathan told attendees at the launch that in terms of market penetration, RAP—The Trading Edition has been the most successful product launch in the more than a decade he’s been at Sybase.

Keith Luo, chairman and managing partner, Investment Trading Systems, Luo Executive Advisers, declared afterwards that he was very enthusiastic about the new version of RAP—The Trading Edition. "This is the right time for it," he said.

The day also provided Sybase the opportunity to pre-release “The New Data Imperative: Managing Real-time Risk in Capital Markets,” a book dealing with the issues of managing risk by the millisecond that Shahrawat had highlighted in his earlier presentation. The authors are Nathan, Irfan Khan, Sybase vice president and chief technology officer, and Sinan Baskan, director of business development for financial markets at Sybase. Their book offers strategies to potentially prevent the world’s financial markets from ever getting blindsided again.

The launch of RAP—The Trading Edition with Time Series and the book presentation culminated Sybase’s day at the NYSE. It had begun with 100 industry and financial analysts crowded in the Board Room and ended publicly with John Chen, Sybase chairman, CEO and president, and his company’s latest partner, Seung An Park, executive vice president of Samsung SDS, ringing the closing bell for the Big Board.
 
The analysts were there to hear a succession of Sybase executives describing their individual and collective efforts to foster the new way of business that is emerging that the company calls the Unwired Enterprise.

The Unwired Enterprise vision enables business-critical information to be securely moved back and forth from the data center to the end device, and delivered to the right person anytime, anywhere.

Nathan said that capital investment historically had focused on automating major labor segments. Until now, the focus was on the task worker, he said. As a labor segment, the task worker is diminishing and being replaced with the new growing segment of information workers.

Continuing to invest in technology that targets the task worker will be of limited benefit, Nathan said. IT should free up investment from maintaining the task worker and refocus on innovating for the information worker and the consumer segments that are driving the impetus to the Unwired Enterprise seen as the growth area for  Sybase’s future success.

Steve Capelli, president of Sybase worldwide field operations, highlighted the fact that Sybase’s continuing innovation in data management and analytics with its leading column-based Sybase IQ analytics server that helped Sybase grow 30 percent in data management notably outpaced the competition through 2008.

Terry Stepien, president of Sybase iAnywhere, identified new innovation in the company’s mobile enterprise platform, including lightweight applications such as iAnywhere Mobile Office which offers device support for the iPhone and advanced hosting functionalities for carriers.

Marty Beard, president of Sybase 365, drew attention to the fact that Sybase has developed an early lead in mCommerce with 36 mobile banking wins, entering the mobile payments market with the acquisition of paybox and addressing the full mCommerce market across operators and financial institutions.

Later, Chen, interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on CNBC, briefly outlined the Sybase Samsung SDS partnership to bring consumer-style social networking features to business software and devices. Chen said Samsung and the recent partnership with SAP give Sybase greater reach and fit into its broader strategy to provide a mobile messaging platform that will bring next generation applications to the enterprise.

Analysts noted a "subtle shift", as one described it, in Sybase's marketing message, in which real time decision-making—or analytics—becomes the objective for unwiring the enterprise.

Some commented positively on Capelli’s presentation on the direction of Sybase’s analytics products, which include:

• The latest release of a complex event processing (CEP) product that seamlessly integrates with statistical and time series analytics in RAP-The Trading Edition by mid-year
• Enhancements to query performance and data loading with Sybase  IQ 15 that is already accelerating analytics for  a broad range of current customers
• An expansion  of RAP into industries beyond financial services in the second half of 2009

Others remarked that Sybase's messaging and mobility businesses represent the company's future when the tornado arrives in handheld device usage. Clearly, they say, the proliferation of SMS and MMS messaging is important to Sybase now, but the real payday will come when handheld devices become extensions of enterprise computing.

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