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Syndera Uses Business Intelligence for Trading

Syndera Corp. is trading in the horizontal life for the vertical world of financial services by providing server-based enterprise software that can monitor a whole host of criteria, alerting users to problems or trends on the fly.

Syndera Corp., based in Redwood City, Calif., is trading in the horizontal life for the vertical world of financial services. The company, which designs real-time business intelligence (BI) software, has decided to drill down into electronic trading, providing server-based enterprise software that can monitor a whole host of criteria, alerting users to problems or trends on the fly.

"Most solutions are good at reporting what has happened in the past," says Perry Mizota, vice president of products. "But there are certain situations where users need to know what is going on right now," he adds. For example, Mizota says, Syndera (booth 1522) recently contracted with a "very large" financial services institution that wanted to use its software to monitor fixed income trading activity.

According to Mizota, the need to know what's going on in electronic-trading systems increases as they become more sophisticated. "With more automation, users and managers don't have the transparency and granular feel for what is really going on like they used to in the manual world," he says.

To combat that, firms can tell Syndera which metrics they would like to monitor in their trading environment. In the example of fixed income, Mizota relates, users often want to know their hit ratio - or the percentage of time they are chosen as the preferred destination to buy or sell an issue of bonds. Drilling down further, users can look into the potential deals they have won and lost -- dissecting them by type of bond, profitability, volume, etc., -- for trends that then can be used to tailor business practices going forward. "All that information is what people want to monitor so that within the day they can change their trading strategies to increase the hit ratio they have," explains Mizota.

The setup is generally that of typical server-based software. In the case of Syndera, however, two servers work in tandem to provide users with the information they need when they want it. The first server is an events server, which monitors the information flow and events going on within the organization. "We have collectors that go out to the sources and collect events and bring that information into the server we have developed, [which] then processes it, correlates, does calculations and computes the metrics that users will see on their desktops," Mizota relates.

But before users see the information on their dashboards, the information flows from the events server to the presentation server, which parses out the right information to the right users based on predetermined criteria and alert parameters.

Not limiting itself to any one asset class, Mizota says, the software also works well with equities and can function to monitor performance across different exchanges. "It really functions to continuously monitor operational activity within an organization and deliver it to users in the form of alerts or indications so they can make decisions faster," he explains.

The product has been available since last summer, but Mizota says Syndera is in no rush, preferring to take a "relatively pragmatic approach, working with our initial customers and making sure they are successful before we become more aggressive" in distribution.

Syndera, according to Mizota, is focused on selling to large sell-side institutions -- "Typically multibillion-dollar types of organizations in the Fortune 1,000," he says. "The average sale price of our software is in the half-million-dollar range, so that price point is obviously better suited for a large organization," Mizota adds.

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