Technology vendor OpenGamma on Monday announced the launch of its open-source trading and risk analytics platform. The company claims the open-source nature of the product can maximize IT resources and reduce costs.
Dubbed OpenGamma Platform 1.0, the open-source software gives users the ability to customize and integrate the platform into existing legacy systems. It features a real-time calculation engine, a built-in library of analytics, market data support and trade data management capabilities.
Kirk Wylie, founder and chief executive officer of OpenGamma, called the platform the plumbing that connects a trading firm’s proprietary systems with the low-level infrastructure and data feeds they work with on a daily basis.
“The systems that the legacy vendors have put out there have not really been tailored to the kind of customizable environment that end users really want,” Wylie said. “We understand their exact requirements, the needs of the traders, and we can make pro-active recommendations on exactly how to maximize the use of the system.”
Wylie said part of being an open-source vendor is accepting that traditional notions of intellectual property no longer apply. With an open-source business model, he said the burden is on the vendor to prove its ongoing value to customers.
Firms want guidance on how to use and adapt the source code of the platform and are willing to pay to have access to the software engineers who wrote it, according to Wylie.
“As much as we are trying to democratize the technology of quantitative finance, at the end of the day, we are not bearded hippies,” he said. “We are bold-faced capitalists, and our product direction is dictated by the needs of our paying customers.”
OpenGamma’s 1.0 platform offers an open-source Bloomberg module, enhanced visualization capabilities, an R integration module and customizable database functionality.
Wylie said the platform’s real-time capabilities are particularly important in a post-crisis world where firms have to be constantly vigilant about counterparty risk.
“If you’re standing on the trading floor, and all of a sudden Lehman blows up, you need something that is giving you numbers second by second across all your asset classes, all your trading desks, and allows you to come in and change the calculations,” Wylie said.
