Correcting a few things VentureBeat got wrong

17 January 2011 By Kirk Wylie

Usually, I like to let small errors by the media go; life is too short to try to chase that every single fact is correct when the press covers you. That being said, today's report by VentureBeat on our funding had a few things that I definitely wanted to address. As VentureBeat moderates comments and hasn't approved mine, this is the best way to address those.

We Don't Have A Product Yet?

This one is the one that I see people surprised about on Twitter the most. The simple fact is that we do have a product (an extremely good one in the OpenGamma Platform); we're in beta in one site already and going into beta in another extremely shortly.

What we don't have is a general available release. I've blogged about this in the past (see: Why We Haven't Launched Yet), and the same things are true now that were true then. When the first Open Source release comes out, we want to make sure that everybody in the world has the confidence that it's production quality (by actually being in production), and has the confidence that the integration points are stable (by having them be used for integration in a real-world environment).

This is the entire point of our Early Adopter Program, a process that has been working extremely well for us.

OpenGamma is A Souped-Up Excel?

Yes and no. It's true that we've built some of the best Excel integration in the industry, so that every single component in an OpenGamma installation can be easily accessed by Excel. It's true that you can build extremely powerful sheet-based solutions using the OpenGamma Excel Integration, which have your entire distributed computational environment backing those sheets. We're extremely proud of what we've done there, and when traders and risk managers see it, they get extremely excited about the possibilities that it offers them.

But that's just part of the story. Excel is one client; we're also building a full-scale web application that will be instantly familiar and comfortable for people who are used to using sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Mint (rather than what passes for a user interface in much of Financial Technology). In addition, we have a comprehensive suite of RESTful, MOM-based, and code-level APIs for accessing every part of the OpenGamma Platform in custom environments. We're constantly evaluating our integration options so that we can put the power of the OpenGamma Platform into as many of the tools that financial professionals use on a daily basis.

And the power, I believe, of our Excel integration, comes from its integration with everything else in the platform. A trader can frame a calculation in Excel and instantly share it (via the web interface, or any other access mechanism) with his colleages in sales, trading, or risk management. A pure Excel solution doesn't give you that power, and that's the power people have told us they want from a risk and analytics infrastructure.

Reliable and Slow Moving Trumps State-of-the-Art?

Personally, I don't believe this to be the case. I believe that the Credit Crunch proved to financial industry professionals that siloed systems separating risk and front office trading, or even desks from each other, aren't suitable for the fast paced modern capital markets. I believe that risk managers know that they need to move from a batch and overnight world into a near-real-time, event-driven world. I believe that firms know that every dollar they spend on maintaining infrastructure that they don't derive proprietary value from is, fundamentally, a dollar they shouldn't have to spend.

But luckily you don't have to take my word for it. I believe it because that's what financial institutions are telling us, on a near daily basis.

If you're interested in finding out more about what OpenGamma can do for you before our GA launch, please feel free to get in contact.