SunGard Front Arena

Business Challenge

With the explosion in mergers and acquisitions, financial services companies need scalability to support market consolidation. Also, legislative changes are enabling trading desk consolidations that require a broad functional and instrument range. Because of these trends, financial services companies try to:

Enhance efficiency and manageability of their user interfaces
Lower cost of matching mechanisms, including cross sell and internal matching, to compete with Electronic Communication Networks (ECN)
Enable upward and downward scalability of technology
Maximize input, throughput, and efficiency of transactions
Reduce transaction costs to offset spread compression driven by decimalization
Contain the cost of broker commissions
Enable rapid ROI on escalating investment requirements

Solution

SunGard's FRONT ARENA is a comprehensive trading and risk analysis tool serving a wide range of sophisticated traders, broker/dealers, and financial analysts. It handles a vast array of functions, operations, markets and instrument types in any currency, including equities, fixed income (including index linked and zero coupon bonds), interest rate derivatives, money market instruments, FX, and FX exotic derivatives. FRONT ARENA distinguishes itself with functional breadth and depth in exchange-traded, structured instruments, proprietary trading and sales, credit spread trading, and real-time risk management. It also supports the creation of new and unique instrument types.

At a Glance - Solution Components

The SunGard FRONT ARENA solution is suited to financial services companies. The solution is available worldwide to enterprise and small- to medium-sized businesses. It is particularly well suited for large investment institutions that trade fixed income instruments and interest rate derivatives. FRONT ARENA is also well suited for small- to medium-sized companies looking for a broad range of functional coverage across a variety of instruments from front to back.

IBM Hardware	IBM xSeries and IBM pSeries

IBM Middleware	IBM WebSphere Application Server

Services and Support	IBM Linux Support Line, IBM Technical Services, and IBM Business Consulting Services

Linux Distribution	Primary: SuSE Enterprise Server 8.0. Secondary: Red Hat Advanced Server 3.0

Benefits

Comprehensive Cross Asset Trading and Risk Management Handles a broad array of instrument types Supports the creation of new and unique instrument types Optimizes trading Uses spreadsheets to price anything from standard government bonds to eurobonds, FRNs, range floaters, and dual currency bonds Provides a full array of risk analysis tools and methods, including simulations and VaR tools Supports credit spread currency conversions Supports variety of pricing and valuation methods Supports price and yield simulation Includes analytics for calculating risk values Offers infinite variety of grouping and aggregation dimensions

Connected in Real-Time to Global Equity and Fixed Income Exchanges Links into real-time market feeds Handles multiple exchanges simultaneously Is programmed for complex strategy execution through trigger conditions

Complete Order Management Solutions across All Asset Classes Streamlines order work flow into a single-deal entry point Supports order consolidation and allocation

Provides Cost Savings of Linux Achieves the demonstrated savings in total cost of ownership provided by running Linux on

Technical Details and Architecture

Database	Sybase / SQLServer

Integration means	Proprietary CITRUS

Communication	Tagged file changing to XML

Application	C, C++, Java

Instrument support	Equities, Fixed Income, Interest Rate Derivatives, Money Market, FX and FX Exotic Derivatives (Strength Credit Derivatives, FX and MM, Sales and Distribution)