Crucial management buy-in

Any investment in implementing new technology is likely to represent a considerable chunk of the annual IT budget. How then can CIOs or CTOs gain that crucial management buy-in to your type of technology? Where is the value ROI going to come from and will the returns likely to be immediate or is this a slow-burning investment prospect? Bharath Rangarajan, Director of Product Marketing at Gemstone Systems, on gaining that crucial management buy-in.

Event-processing and in-memory data management technologies from vendors like GemStone are in fact considerably less expensive than databases or storage software/hardware investments, which account for a significant chunk of annual IT budgets. That said, these new technologies (i.e., event processing and in-memory data management) are being deployed in several mission-critical applications in financial services firms. For that reason, there is a need for CIOs and CTOs to gain management buy-in before such deployments are made. However, this process is made easier by the compelling nature of such technologies in the current business climate, wherein profitable opportunities are fleeting, operational efficiencies are extremely important and latency cannot be tolerated. CIOs and CTOs nowadays have a lot more influence and they work closely with their business counterparts on key decisions, especially with the advent of trends such as electronic trading, stringent compliance regulations and distributed global operations that have a significant dependency on technology.

A leading investment bank that deployed such a technology (from GemStone systems) in their equities trading division was able to keep their order books open longer, especially around market close and hence were able to accept more orders and generate more revenues. As per their assessment, just a few ‘good’ days of trading would cover their investment in this type of technology. Their equities trading division witnessed a 30 percent increase in revenues in the quarter that followed the production deployment of this solution. Another investment bank was able to significantly streamline their FX pricing workflow (using GemFire from GemStone) to deliver updated quotes with a latency of under 5ms. As a consequence, they were able to woo most of the clients and trump their competition.

As can be seen, the ROI from such investments are immediate, tangible and quantifiable. But more interestingly, such innovative technologies make new business models and operations that span across multiple asset classes and geographies a reality. Existing infrastructures lack the sophistication or throughput capabilities to accomplish the same. In addition to the significant top-line growth, event-processing and in-memory management technologies avoid the need for expensive hardware and software or dedicated personnel to guarantee requisite levels of performance and scalability. This automatically contributed to a lower TCO and measurable bottom-line growth.