Grid Computing

IBM Optimized Analytic Infrastructure for Financial Services Firms

IBM Optimized Analytic Infrastructure enables alignment of IT assets with the specific business goals of financial services firms, addressing requirements for rapid and highly accurate decision making for pricing, trading and risk analytics. This is designed to help firms:

• Drive higher margins and revenue growth
• Achieve near real-time and intraday decision making
• Improve flexibility of the underlying analytics infrastructure to adapt more quickly to changing conditions
• Reduce costs and enhance standardization of existing analytic infrastructures

To be competitive in today's financial services marketplace requires performance of complex analytics and computations in near real-time for a broad portfolio of products and activities such as derivatives, structured and fixed-income products, risk management, program trading, actuarial analysis, hedging and portfolio rebalancing.

From a business perspective, firms need to accelerate development of complex financial products with shorter life cycles. A repeatable and consistent process for global deployment of applications is also critical. This enables the pursuit of higher margins and revenue growth while meeting client demands for innovation and specialization.

From a technical perspective, financial services firms demand a dynamic IT infrastructure that rapidly responds to changing business needs and requirements. This requires an operationally efficient analytics infrastructure scalable for increasing data volumes, complexity, and a spectrum of computational profiles. As well, this infrastructure needs to be inherently low latency, extremely fast, standards-based and highly flexible, and address data center constraints of space, power and cooling.

IBM Optimized Analytic Infrastructure (OAI) responds to these requirements and has been designed to help financial services firms address their business and technical concerns so they can compete more successfully in today's environment. The OAI leverages IBM's longtime expertise in grid and high-performance computing; is built on technologies that integrate the management of applications, workloads, data and systems; leverages IBM's leading optimization technologies; and is proven as a flexible and responsive IT infrastructure for IBM financial services clients.

Three differentiating technologies are at the heart of the OAI: IBM ApplicationWeb, IBM General Parallel File System, and workload management software from IBM in LoadLeveler and from IBM Business Partner Altair.

Also, OAI makes full use of open technologies such as Linux® solutions which allows for ease of interoperability, integration and customization, delivering a level of system choice and flexibility that is difficult to achieve with a proprietary operating system.

IBM world-class service and support provide an array of value-added benefits including grid computing application assessment, installation, UNIX®-to-Linux migration, integration and single-point-of-service contact.

A large Asian bank's existing analytics infrastructure limited the company's ability to maintain market leadership in complex structured instruments. They needed to run risk calculations on more than 19 instruments per day, but the firm's inability to scale its IT system was slowing business growth in high-margin products. With IBM OAI, the bank successfully set up a dynamic infrastructure to support complex analytics calculations of risk and valuation and maintain it's leadership position.