Quick thank you to the clients and partners who took some time out of their working day to attend our breakfast briefing, “Financial Markets Data and Analytics. Everywhere You Need Them.” at Microsoft’s Times Square offices last Friday morning. Not particularly great weather on here in Manhattan so it was great to see around 60 folks turn up…

Rupesh Khendry of Microsoft (Head of World-Wide Capital Markets Solutions) started the event and set out the agenda for the morning. Rupesh described the expense of data within financial markets, and the difficulties experienced by risk managers in pulling together all the data and analytics they need, and following Rupesh was Antonio Zurlo (below) of Microsoft (Senior Program Manager) who explained the fundamentals of Microsoft Azure and what services and infrastructure it offers, including public cloud, virtual private cloud and hybrid cloud architectures. Antonio also described a key usage pattern for HPC/grid on Azure being used to “burst to the cloud” when on-premise infrasture needs to be extended for end/intra-day risk calcs…

Sang Lee (below) of Aite Group (Managing Partner) then delivered his presentation “Floating in the Capital Markets Cloud: Moving Beyond Data Storage”. Sang’s main findings from the survey of 20 financial institutions were that concerns about security and SLAs relating to cloud usage remain, but even those that were concerned about this also said they were planning to start a cloud project within the next 24 months. Cloud technology seems to becoming more acceptable of late, and Sang said this seems to be due to regulation, cost pressures and the desire to offer better services to clients. Sang confirmed that HPC/Grid with “burst to the cloud” is a common usage pattern and that “Data as a Service” is becoming more popular…

Fred Veasley (below) of Microsoft (Tech Solutions Professional) to introduce Microsoft Power BI and Office 365. Fred explained how Power BI extended the capabilities of Excel with data search (finding and retrieving publicized data sources both within an organization and over the web), its integration capabilities with standard databases, NoSQL databases, data standards such as OData and new APIs/sources of data such as Facebook. Once downloaded, the data can be shaped and merged with other datasets (for instance combining data from positions databases/systems with analytics and data from the cloud), and kept up to date automatically. In addition to Power BI, Power View enables great visualizations and interactive dashboards to be created, and once finalized these can be deployed centrally via web pages down to end users…

After Fred, Brian Sentance (below), CEO of Xenomorph explained the origins of the TimeScape MarketPlace. Based on some discussions with Microsoft about 18 months back, the idea was effectively to firstly to get TimeScape running in the Microsoft Azure cloud, secondly to turn the data management capabilities of TimeScape “upside-down” by using it as a means to upload and publish data to the cloud and thirdly to provide one-to-many access to multiple sources of data via web interfaces and key delivery tools such as Microsoft Power BI. Put another way, without any local software or hardware infrastructure both business users and IT staff can access multiple data sources in the same format and using the same data model wherever the data is needed. In addition to .NET and Java interfaces to the TimeScape MarketPlace via OData, web API delivery into F#, Python, R and MATLAB are all in development…

…and in addition to downloading data via Power BI, Brian also demonstrated how you could build on the data using “Power View” to create powerful analytical dashboard functionality that could be built and tested in Excel, then deployed centrally within a browser for access by users outside of Excel. He added that partners was one of the key aspects for the platform, and introduced the TimeScape MarketPlace Partner Program for the platform to get data, analytics, model vendors, software and service vendors involved and building on the platform. Andrew Tognela (below) of Microsoft (Worldwide Managing Director) closed the presentations…