SageMaker takes aim at financial services

SageWave 4.0 to power portal for yet another vertical market

The financial services market is changing, says Jim Feingold of SageMaker. “You can trade stock anywhere for pennies a share. Even investment banking seems to be a commodity these days,” he believes. So, for a financial institution to be competitive, it has to invest in its workers and provide them with key information when they need it.

Clearly, not everybody needs the same information. A research analyst may need a combination of internal information, maybe just one or two applications, say a total return analysis and some sort of spreadsheet. The investment banker may want to cull through all the information that the entire firm subscribes to, whether it’s all the news feeds, all internal market reports, all external periodicals, real-time news and research reports.

By granting “permission” to see information depending on the user’s role, the SageMaker Financial Portal cuts costs because sometimes users subscribe to data not needed by everyone. Says Feingold, “It solves the specific business problem of getting the right information quickly. We’ve found that on Wall Street, users go to one separate machine to access Primark disclosure data, then they go to their Bloomberg and yet another for Edgar-Online. We bring all that together.”

SageMaker is targeting its portal to off-trading-floor employees. “We’re leaving the trading desk to the Reuters and Bloombergs of the world. Customers include the IMF World Bank, JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch

Currently, SageMaker has an ASP model with more than 300 different news sources users can subscribe to, research reports and a large number of applications to plug into. Additionally, the company can install its technology on site and allow consultants or internal IT departments to build gateways to the internal data sources and use the SageMaker front end to display it. Says Feingold, “We essentially have an out-of-the-box portal that is customizable--or not needed to be customized at all.”

The engine behind the financial portal is SageWave 4.0, which, says company founder Ron Bienvenu, is a new way to manage multiple databases--buss architecture. Before adopting this approach (called SageBuss), it was necessary to manage an extremely complicated code base of various scripts that were running multiple queries through multiple databases.

“With 50 databases, it’s a nightmare, but it’s still manageable. Once we started getting to the hundreds of data sets the complexity was overwhelming, you just couldn’t keep track. You’d make a change in one script it would screw something else up,” explains Bienvenu. All of the content had to go through a single interface.

Buss architecture decouples the front and back ends with the creation of a middleware layer. When a user passes along the query it goes along the buss. Anything connected to the buss alerts the data using XML, saying it has data about that particular topic and then checks to see if the user has a right to see it.

“The beauty of that is if you pull a database off, you don’t have to rewrite any scripts,” says Bienvenu, “If you add a new database, you don’t have to adjust existing scripts to be able to call up that data. It’s a very fluid and flexible environment.”

Bienvenu cites on-the-fly language translation as an example of the advantage of buss architecture. “You pass a query to 15 databases to convert the output from English to French. Each database gets a query, each sends back data, then you’ve got to direct the data to the language translator system and then convert that and deliver the data,” he says. “That’s great, but what happens if you add another database? You’ve got to modify the script. What happens if you change language translation vendors? You’ve got to modify the scripts.”

With buss architecture, the translator is connected to the buss. If a user sends a request to the translator, anything moving along the buss will get translated and delivered to the front end. “If you switch language translators, you just pull one off and stick another one on,” says Bienvenu. “And you don’t have to adjust queries. You don’t have to adjust your scripting languages. So it’s a much more scalable, much more flexible design.”