Another article about the operational risk generated by the usage of spreadsheets within the financial markets (see earlier posts), appeared in the April issue of Waters Magazine.

The articles highlights how spreadsheets are largely used within financial institutions and suggests that the current regulation requirements for more transparency and ad-hoc risk management might push the proliferation of spreadsheets even further. The articles also refers to the progress and improvements made by Microsoft in recent versions of Excel to increase the security of spreadsheets.

Xenomorph has worked closely with Microsoft on hosting its time series database within SQL Server 2008. The case study we have written together describes how SQL Server 2008 offers integration within Office Excel 2007 so that whilst the spreadsheet is still the end-user viewing tool, operational risk is reduced by engaging Excel 2007 as an analytics and reporting tool and not as a mean of storing data.

Our TimeScape solution offers more than 700 easy to use add-in functions to Office Excel 2007 and we are currently working on the use of Excel Services, part of Microsoft Office Share Point Server 2007, to further enhance the centralized approach to spreadsheet.

If you are interested in how Xenomorph solves the problem of spreadsheet management, then take a look at our (newly updated) website. Here we explain how to solve the problem and how Xenomorph Spreadsheet Inside technology can bring unstructured spreadsheet data and complex calculation within a centralized data management system, increasing transparency and reducing operational risk.