Designed for Integration
Existing System Re-use
While true green-field development does exist in financial services, it's exceptionally rare. Firms already have a variety of trade processing, analytics, and risk systems in place. They may not support their current requirements, they may not be as capable or flexible as the OpenGamma Platform, but no firm can or should simply throw them all away and start from scratch.
We think risk technology architecture should be designed to use and complement systems already supporting traders and risk managers. Whether proprietary or vendor solutions, considerable investments have been made in terms of time and money to make these systems work. Discarding them and starting from scratch risks losing valuable data and insight, and adds to the cost of rebuilding.
That being said, a primary goal of any project rethinking analytics or risk computation needs to be the elimination of all the problems siloed, legacy systems have: duplication of technology, lack of transparency, reconciliation difficulties, inefficient IT resourcing, etc.
The OpenGamma Platform was built from scratch specifically to integrate with any legacy data source, analytics library, trading system, or market data feed. Once that integration is done against our rich set of APIs and network endpoints, you can get the benefits of that integration across any project based on the OpenGamma Platform.
In addition, each component of the OpenGamma Platform is individually usable. This allows the incremental upgrade and migration of legacy systems, without having to move the core of the system to the OpenGamma Platform to reap the benefits. This lets customers gradually migrate while continuing to deliver key functionality to the desk.
We don't believe in forklift upgrades, and neither should you. Our experience in complex integration challenges for front office and risk analytics is one of the primary reasons customers work with our implementation experts, and one of the biggest benefits commercial customers get out of their support agreements.
OpenGamma as an Extension to Your IT
The OpenGamma Platform - available via an Open Source license - is a tool for the development of modern, specific functionality and applications aimed at delivering better, more accurate and more timely data to the Front-Office. The technical team at OpenGamma is available to help integrate existing solutions and ensure the optimum benefits are achieved from its installation and future enhancements (e.g. by consolidating desks or adding other asset classes). OpenGamma can in this regard be considered to be extending your IT resources, both in terms of capabilities and capacity, and giving you new freedom to deliver the previously impossible!
When deciding to deploy the OpenGamma Platform, you're not faced with a traditional build-vs-buy decision. Rather, our business model and technology stack gives you the best of both worlds. You have the transparency and control you get from building your whole solution in house, with a strong vendor supporting your efforts at every step along the way.
Analytics Library Support
OpenGamma is designed to integrate both proprietary and third-party analytics libraries. Alternatively, the OpenGamma Platform ships with the Open Source analytics library we have developed in-house. Unlike some vendors, we've invested heavily in a top-notch quantitative analysis and development team, and are producing and maintaining a modern, production quality analytics library capable of satisfying most complex trading environments. The library can be used as-is for standardized products, or as building blocks for exotic and structured pricing models. We encourage all our clients to make a comparison of this library to their own, and evaluate the merits of using an analytics library that is under continuous enhancements and provided on an Open Source basis.