Recognizing Excellence

In our seventh annual Waters Rankings, the readers of Waters choose the mission-critical solutions and services that get the job done. By the Editors
If the current economic crisis were to write a personal ad, it would read: "Desperately Seeking Excellence."

As we emerge from the recession and slowly march toward the recovery, we must remember that the pursuit of excellence is not only a lofty and worthwhile goal; it will help us to prepare ourselves for when the sun does shine again on the global capital markets. And for the seventh year in a row, the annual Waters Rankings focused on excellence in financial IT solutions and services.

As always, technologists inside major investment firms voted for the mission-critical gear they turn to in order to get the job done and make sure that traders are satisfied and risk managers see the big picture. Overseeing the technology and infrastructure inside an investment firm is never easy but these solutions and services help CIOs do just that.

Waters saw a huge response from voters this year. More than 1,000 readers cast their ballots and the winner's circle has some new names.

To make Waters Rankings even more relevant, we added new categories for emerging technology-such as cloud computing-and we split our risk management solutions award into four separate categories: best credit risk solution, best market risk solution, best counterparty risk solution and best risk analytics provider. The readers of Waters are on the cutting edge of solving tomorrow's challenges and this year's Waters Rankings show what they are using to solve those problems today.

Winner's Circle

Best Brokerage: Goldman Sachs            Page 18

Best Sell-Side Clearing Provider: JPMorgan Clearing Corp.    Page 18

Best Exception and Reconciliation Provider: SmartStream     Page 18

Best Sell-Side OMS Provider: Fidessa    Page 19

Best Buy-Side OMS Provider: Linedata Services   Page 19

Best Portfolio Management System Provider: Advent            Page 19

Best Crossing Network Provider: Nasdaq              Page 20

Best Enterprise Data Management Provider: Sybase             Page 20

Best AML Compliance Solution Provider: Oracle/Mantas        Page 21

Best Reference Data Solution Provider: Bloomberg               Page 21

Best Corporate Actions Solution: Fidelity ActionsXchange    Page 21

Best Low-Latency Data Feed Provider: Bloomberg               Page 22

Best Execution Management  System Provider: ITG               Page 22

Best Risk Analytics Provider: Algorithmics             Page 23

Best Counterparty Risk Management Provider: SunGard       Page 23

Best Market Risk Solution Provider: Murex             Page 24

Best Credit Risk Solution Provider: RiskVal             Page 24

Best CEP Solution Provider: Aleri/Coral8 and Tibco                Page 25

Best Outsourcing Partner: Infosys Technology      Page 25

Best Hosting Provider: BT       Page 26

Best Trading Turret Provider: IPC            Page 26

Best Back-Office Hardware Provider: IBM             Page 27

Best Data Grid Provider: IBM   Page 27

Best Server Virtualization Provider: VMWare         Page 28

Best Cloud Computing Provider: Microsoft              Page 28

Best Brokerage

Going for Goldman

1 Goldman Sachs (18.8%)

2 JPMorgan (9.5%)

3 ITG (8.8%)

After a year of unprecedented turmoil in the financial markets, Goldman Sachs has held the course as Best Brokerage, taking first place in the category for the fourth year in a row. The New-York based investment powerhouse dominated the competition by winning more than twice the votes netted by nearest rival JPMorgan.

Goldman's success is due in part to its award-winning execution management system RediPlus, which allows clients to trade equities, options, futures, foreign exchange and synthetics from a single application. The solution also provides access to Goldman Sachs algorithmic strategies in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia. Users can also route orders through the Sigma smart router and post orders directly to the Sigma X crossing network.

RediPlus received a significant update in April with version 9.0, which is the first of two major releases planned for 2009. It brings enhancements to options trading functionality, including three new algorithmic strategies, the ability to auto-hedge options orders, and active limit support.

Best Sell-Side Clearing Provider

JPMorgan Clears Up

1 JPMorgan Clearing Corp. (15.8%)

2 Goldman Sachs (12.7%)

3 Citigroup/BNP Paribas (8.2%)

It's the second year on top for this year's winner of Best Sell-Side Clearing Provider. After coming from nowhere to take first place in 2008, JPMorgan Clearing Corp. seals the deal once again with 15.8 percent of the vote, up 1.4 percentage points from last year. Goldman Sachs took second, building slightly on their 2008 share of 11 percent and ousting Citi, which was relegated to a joint third with BNP Paribas.

JPMorgan Clearing Corp. provides clearing, custody, operations, technology and order execution capabilities to broker-dealers worldwide. Its platform supports diverse business types including institutional/capital markets, trading, wealth management, prime brokerage, fixed income and international firms.

The firm's capabilities include domestic and international equities, options, mutual funds and a broad range of fixed-income products with rolling 24-hour operations coverage from New York to London to Hong Kong and international settlement capabilities in over 75 markets.

JPMorgan Clearing Corp.'s Web-based workstation, MORCOM, provides unified access to detailed account information, performance reporting, trading, risk analytics, investment planning and asset allocation.

Best Exception and Reconciliation Provider

SmartStream's TLM Top of the Class

1 SmartStream (32.9%)

2 Omgeo (26%)

3 SunGard (20%)

Exceptions and reconciliations management has been thrust into the spotlight in the last year as firms rush to understand firm-wide risk exposures. SmartStream proved top of the class in this new category with 32.9 percent of the vote. Also showing in the top three were second place Omgeo, which garnered 26 percent of the votes, and SunGard, which came in third with 20 percent of the tallies.

As part of its suite of transaction lifecycle management (TLM) solutions, SmartStream offers TLM Corona for the reconciliation and exception management of cash, securities, and money market transactions; and TLM Reconciliations, a solution that offers matching for a range of reconciliation and investigation requirements. TLM OnDemand is the software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of TLM Reconciliations and offers cash, stock and securities positions reconciliations. It is aimed at small banks, asset managers and hedge funds that prefer to outsource IT and avoid the higher upfront costs associated with the traditional software license model.

When it comes to exception management, Smart-Stream is quite exceptional.

Best Sell-Side OMS Provider

Fidessa Holds First

1 Fidessa (28.7%)

2 SunGard (21.9%)

3 Bloomberg (19%)

Continuing its upward trajectory, Fidessa takes first place in the sell-side order management system (OMS) category for the second year in a row. The London-based vendor netted 28.7 percent of the vote, which is up from 24.7 percent last year.

Waters readers turn to Fidessa for its powerful multi-asset trading functionality, integrated market data and connectivity to exchanges and liquidity venues, brokers, buy-side firms. When a floor of traders is looking for an able-bodied OMS, Fidessa is the one-stop solution for sell-side firms trading the world's financial markets.

Fidessa serves a broad range of clients that range from boutique regional brokers to large international institutions. Its platform is currently available as a global enterprise solution, with regional trading platforms tailored for firms based in Europe, US, Canada, Asia, or as a standalone workstation.

This year, Fidessa added BlueBox, its fully integrated algorithmic trading engine, to its hosted Asian trading platform. The new addition provides easy access to industry standard algorithmic strategies and a toolkit for clients who want to build and offer their own trading models.

SunGard placed second with 21.9 percent and third place belonged to Bloomberg with 19 percent.

Best Buy-Side OMS Provider

Repeat Win for Linedata

1 Linedata Services (28.5%)

2 Bloomberg (25.9%)

3 Thomson Reuters/Charles River Development (7.2%)

For the second year running, the readers of Waters magazine chose Linedata Services as champion of the buy-side order management system (OMS) category. In a tight race, with 28.5 percent of the vote, the French vendor narrowly beat out last year's runner-up Bloomberg, which was hot on its heels with 25.9 percent of the votes. Thomson Reuters and Charles River Development tied for third with 7.2 percent of the votes each.

Despite winning last year, Linedata Services hasn't wasted any time. In April it launched Version 7 of its LongView Trading OMS. The release includes enhanced functionality across all areas of the system including trading, portfolio management, compliance and support of the alternative investment markets. The new version contains full Financial products Markup Language (FpML) mapping to support firms' audit and compliance demands and their derivatives trading needs. This release also saw the debut of LongView Live, a graphically rich application including sophisticated data visualization tools.

In June, Linedata Services launched the NAV dashboard for the MFact fund accounting product, which manages the net asset value process with real-time exception management.

Best Portfolio Management System Provider

Advent Advances

1 Advent (26.5%)

2 Bloomberg (23%)

3 Linedata Services (11.5%)

There's a new champ in the portfolio management system (PMS) category. Last year, the top three were SunGard, Charles River Development and Linedata Services. This year, Advent took first place in the portfolio management category with 26.5 percent of the vote, as Bloomberg clinched second place with 23 percent. Like last year, Linedata Services remained in third with 11.5 percent of total votes.

The appearance of Advent is far from surprising; it has been providing innovative technology to the buy side for more than 25 years. The solution provider offers three PMS and accounting platforms to cover a broad range of client profiles and needs. Advent's Geneva is a global PMS and fund accounting solution designed for global asset managers, hedge funds, hedge fund service providers and prime brokers.

Other Advent solutions include Exchange, an end-to-end portfolio manager that integrates the front-office functions of prospecting, marketing, and customer relationship management with the back-office operations of portfolio accounting and reporting. Axys is Advent's turnkey reporting system for small to mid-size investment management concerns.

Best Crossing Network Provider

Nasdaq Crosses to the Top

1 Nasdaq (22%)

2 ITG (17.4%)

3 Goldman Sachs (16.9%)

The crossing networks space has seen tough competition over the last 12 months-so tough, in fact, that last year's winner Liquidnet is nowhere to be seen. This year, Nasdaq OMX comes from nowhere to take the Best Crossing Network Provider crown.

Using technology from the Inet electronic communication network it acquired in 2005, Nasdaq OMX operates on one of the fastest and most efficient platforms in the world that processes more than 250,000 messages per second. Nasdaq has led the way in crossing technology, as evidenced by its successful opening and closing crosses, where, on index and rebalance days, cross volume reaches hundreds of millions.

The opening and closing crosses are price discovery facilities that cross orders at a single price. This enables market participants to execute on-open and on-close interest and provide unparalleled transparency. All nationally listed securities are eligible for the crosses, which generate opening and closing prices widely used by industry professionals.

ITG Posit is back on track, taking second place after slipping from the winning position in 2007 to third last year. For decades, traders have relied on ITG's trusted Posit Suite of crossing networks to reach buy-side-to-buy-side liquidity across a multitude of fragmented sources. Traders can efficiently execute large blocks of stock or small, illiquid names. Moreover, because there is no human intervention, Posit eliminates information leakage and market impact.

Goldman Sachs slides one place from 2008 to take the third position. Clients trading US shares can cross orders with non-displayed liquidity in Goldman's Sigma X crossing network, which comprises of a customer-to-customer crossing network and a host of external liquidity providers. In Europe, the Sigma suite of products offers sophisticated crossing logic as well as the ability to access multiple liquidity sources, both displayed and dark, with no change to existing workflow.

Best Enterprise Data Management System Provider

Navigating the Data Flood

1 Sybase (19.9%)

2 IBM (18.2%)

3 SunGard (17.2%)

Like the tide, the waves of incoming data never cease. Even as investment houses collapse and banks merge in desperation, the volume of data is not expected to level off anytime soon. Throw in the volatility of this current recession and an anxious recovery, and observers agree that the flood of data will not abate anytime soon. High tide will continue.

Buried deep beneath the surface of this data lie many important bits of information, two of which are of primary importance to an investment firm's survival. The data holds a true picture of a firm's risk exposure and it also contains clues to new trading strategies that could send the firm to dry land. With so much at stake, flushing the data is not an option.

For the second year in a row, the winner of the enterprise data management is financial solution provider Sybase. The vendor won with 19.9 percent of the votes this year. To show how roiling the waters are when it comes to EDM, the winner and the third-place runner-up were separated by a mere 2.7 percentage points. Second-place winner IBM won 18.2 percent of the votes, while SunGard won a respectable 17.2 percent of all tallies. 

Sybase has focused on enterprise data management like a lighthouse with a laser beam with the release of Sybase RAP-The Trading Edition. This enterprise data management platform includes time series functionality and integration with the Sybase CEP solution and it is designed to accelerate analytics throughout a trade's lifecycle. With a wide point of view, RAP takes a close and unforgiving look at both low latency and historical data needs within the trading day.

Sybase RAP allows traders to respond quickly to market opportunities with quick and deep analysis of market and historical data. With risk on everyone's mind, the solution helps firms monitor their balance sheet exposure in a shorter window of time. Staying afloat has never been easier.

Best AML Compliance Solution Provider

Follow the Money

1 Oracle/Mantas (32.2%)

2 SAS (21.9%)

3 Fiserv/OpenLink (12%) - Tie

For the third year running, Oracle-owned Mantas takes the prize in the category of best anti-money laundering (AML) solution provider. Mantas carried 32.2 percent of the vote, followed by SAS in second with 21.9 percent, and a tie for third place between Fiserv and OpenLink, with 12 percent of the vote each. The race was more closely fought than last year, when Mantas took a staggering 72.8 percent of the vote.

The Oracle Mantas Behavior Detection Platform integrates detection, prevention, investigation, and resolution of suspicious financial activity across multiple channels, jurisdictions, lines of businesses, and customer lifecycle stages. Oracle/Mantas' Anti-Money Laundering, Fraud, Know Your Customer, Broker Compliance, and Trading Compliance are part of a comprehensive suite of applications designed to deliver value to financial institutions at a low total cost of ownership.

The Oracle Mantas Behavior Detection Platform creates transparency, increasing firms' ability to understand their business-both in terms of risks and opportunities. Oracle/Mantas solutions are deployed in 67 countries.

Best Reference Data Solution Provider

Bloomberg Breaks Away

1 Bloomberg (55.6%)

2 Thomson Reuters (12.8%)

3 Interactive Data (6.4%)

When it comes to almost any form of financial data, Bloomberg is a ubiquitous presence throughout the industry. It comes as no surprise to see that it dominates the opposition in the newly introduced Best Reference Data category, gaining more than half of the total vote.

Bloomberg Data License allows for single-source referencing for global securities databases by delivering indicative, calculated, historical pricing and corporate-action information. To assist clients with the delivery and integration of data feeds, front-end applications are also included in the package.

Data License provides flexible access to more than 5 million instruments spanning all global capital markets. Nearly 5,000 unique data elements stored in Bloomberg's data warehouse allow users to fuel their internal applications with the same quality data relied upon by financial professionals in more than 126 countries across the globe. Data can be customized with either full-universe coverage or specific data formats.

Meanwhile, Reuters DataScope Select supplies the full range of Thomson Reuters pricing and reference data including fixed-income evaluated pricing for over 1 million US securities and evaluated prices on 80,000 European securities in four major currencies.

Best Corporate Actions Solution

ActionsXchange Steps Up

1 Fidelity ActionsXchange (21.3%)

2 DTCC (16.2%)

3 XSP (15.9%)

Recognizing an increased need for dependable, high-quality corporate actions solutions, Waters introduced this category last year, when fewer than 6 percentage points separated first and third place. This year first and second places remain unchanged, but the results were decidedly more clear-cut. Fidelity ActionsXchange netted 21.3 percent of the vote, while the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. (DTCC) managed 16.2 percent of all tallies. XSP brought up the rear, just 0.3 percentage points behind DTCC.

Fidelity clearly has some history in providing corporate actions solutions to global asset managers, hedge funds and broker-dealers. In 1997, Fidelity launched Fidelity ActionsXchange as a commercial technology business and software product in response to an in-house need for high-quality corporate actions data.

The ActionsXChange product line includes the ActionService offering-a full corporate actions data outsourcing service that collates and compares corporate actions data from multiple vendor sources in order to supply "scrubbed" corporate actions announcements.

Best Low-Latency Data Feed Provider

Bloomberg Sets the Benchmark

1 Bloomberg (51.4%)

2 Thomson Reuters (11.2%)

3 Interactive Data (7.6%)

Speed is certainly of the essence in this newly created Waters Rankings category. As electronic trading becomes more and more prevalent, there is a growing need for low-latency and ultra-low-latency solutions, designed to process market updates and turn around orders within mere milliseconds.

With more than half of the total vote, Bloomberg utterly dominated the competition. Nearest rival Thomson Reuters' won just 11.2 percent of the vote, while. Interactive Data scraped into third place with 7.6 percent.

Bloomberg's B-Pipe is a real-time data distribution service, which allows clients to seamlessly integrate Bloomberg content with their own systems. The offering delivers data from more than 200 trading venues including the New York Stock Exchange, The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) and the Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA). Keeping pace with market developments, data from ELX Futures, a fully electronic alternative exchange, will be available on B-Pipe as well as all Bloomberg terminals upon the launch of the exchange, which is scheduled to begin live trading this month.

Reuters Data Feed Direct offers a total latency of less than 1 millisecond and is ideal for algorithmic trading programs and other high-speed machine trading applications, thanks to its ultra-low latency full-tick feeds, direct from exchanges. The solution integrates with Reuters Data Feeds and Reuters Market Data Service, allowing users to leverage existing consolidated feed and market data infrastructure.

Interactive Data's PlusFeed is a high-speed digital data feed that integrates real-time data from more than 450 sources and exchanges worldwide and covers more than 5 million instruments. It supplies coverage of markets in the US, Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America, South America, and Africa. Interactive Data also offers DirectPlus, an ultra-low latency direct exchange data service that allows clients to power their trading applications with sub-millisecond data.

Best Execution Management System Provider

ITG Holds Firm

1 ITG (30.1%)

2 Bloomberg (26.2%)

3 SunGard (8.5%)

Investment Technology Group (ITG) continues to rise up through the ranks of execution management systems (EMSes). Having finished second in the 2007 Waters Rankings EMS category, it went on to nudge Bloomberg out of the top position 12 months later. This year, the New York-based agency brokerage and technology provider nearly doubled its share of votes, earning 30.1 percent of all tallies.

There are several closely linked but subtly different members of the ITG EMS family. Triton, the most widely used of ITG's EMSes, is a global trading system for equities and derivatives that helps traders improve decision-making, automate execution strategies, manage orders, and analyze performance. Thanks to a global view, Triton allows regional trading desks to share lists across time zones, trade in emerging markets, and evaluate global trade performance from a single platform.

The Matrix solution tackles electronic execution and risk management and it allows clients to access individual markets or trade multiple asset classes side-by-side. At the same time, the Matrix market data and order entry application programming interfaces (APIs) enable low-latency, multi-asset direct market access from a black-box or automated trading strategy. Radical is a broker-neutral trading system that provides instant direct access to major North American and European exchanges, ECNs and MTFs.

Best Risk Analytics Provider

Algorithmics Towers Above

1 Algorithmics (28.5%)

2 Moody's (14.9%)

3 Sophis/SunGard (12.7%)

Algorithmics dominated the competition in the newly created Best Risk Analytics category. The Canadian vendor won 28.5 percent of the total votes, almost twice as many as its nearest rival Moody's, which secured 14.9 percent. Sophis and SunGard shared third place with 12.7 percent of the vote.

In use since 1996, Algorithmics' Algo Market Analytics supports market risk capital measurement, management and mark-to-market, enabling calculation of minimum capital under standardized and internal model approaches. The solution captures and consolidates exposures arising from multiple risk factors including interest rates, equity markets, credit spreads, volatilities, foreign exchange, power and commodities in over 20 different geographic markets. The range of risk analytics offered incorporates stress testing, simulation-based scenario generation, aggregation, drill-down and portfolio optimization.

Users can benefit from easily scalable architecture, allowing customization to specific environments and emerging business requirements. The solution also supports the integration of third-party and proprietary valuation models.

By offering a fully integrated view of risk, Algo Market Analytics helps financial institutions eliminate the costs and inconsistencies that can result from accommodating multiple systems and competing standards across the enterprise.

Best Counterparty Risk Management Solution Provider

Get the Counterparty Started

1 SunGard (17.2%)

2 Risk Val (14.5%)

3 Murex (11.5%)

The events of September 2008 turned the nightmare scenario that a major investment house could become insolvent over a weekend into reality. The collapse of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that even a financial services giant with a solid reputation was not immune to failure, and it sent firms running to shore up their counterparty risk provisions.

In this climate, many market participants turned to SunGard to monitor and tackle this hitherto overlooked slice of risk. In a category newly created for the 2009 Waters Rankings, the financial services giant took the lead with 17.2 percent of all votes in this category, compared to the 14.5 percent of votes for runner-up RiskVal and 11.5 percent for third place Murex. This close margin-less than 6 percentage points between the top three contestants-reveals how hot this market truly is in the minds of Waters readers.

As a ubiquitous financial services IT provider, SunGard has a sharp focus on counterparty risk. This May, Nordea Bank signed on to use the vendor's Adaptiv Analytics to manage counterparty credit exposure in its capital markets space. In the same month, SunGard acquired the ICE Risk solution from the IntercontinentalExchange. ICE Risk is a real-time position-keeping and risk management system that captures and values exchange-traded and cleared products across multiple trading venues. It will work closely with SunGard's Kiodesk commodity trading toolset. It also provides exchange connectivity with real-time trade feeds. According to SunGard, "a lower tolerance for counterparty risk [is] leading many commodity trading firms to favor clearing through an exchange clearinghouse."

Runner-up RiskVal's risk management solution moves beyond traditional risk assessment and monitoring tools to provide in-depth, pre-trade and during trade multifaceted risk analysis. The vendor claims its risk solutions are in use in several institutional investment firms and hedge funds.

Having a clear-eyed and sober view of counterparty risk is essential for your firm's survival and your client's assets. 

Best Market Risk Solution Provider

Murex Stares Down Risk

1 Murex (16.2%)

2 RiskVal (14.2%)

3 Algorithmics (9.9%)

As firms move toward the forthcoming recovery, the task at the top of their to-do lists is "improve risk procedures." They are not alone. Sweeping reforms are now being made to regulatory structures across the globe that highlight the need for more capable risk management protocols and tools. In light of this, Waters has dedicated a new Best Market Risk Solution category to the 2009 Waters Rankings. This addition recognizes those solutions that help financial services firms deal with tumultuous equity, commodity and currency markets and fluctuating interest rates. This year, Murex debuts in first place by taking 16.2 percent of the vote compared to RiskVal's 12.9 percent and Algorithmics' 9.9 percent of all votes.

MX.3 is Murex's third-generation integrated cross-asset trading, processing and risk management platform and it offers an enterprise-wide risk management framework for value-at-risk (VaR), limits, compliance and collateral management. It comes equipped with a VaR Server that provides parametric, historical or Monte Carlo VaR. A limits management component-MLC Compliance Monitor and Murex Collateral Manager-is also part of the overall solution.

The MX Asset Manager portfolio management, trading and straight-through processing system, which is designed for investment, pension and insurance fund managers, includes a powerful stress testing module that enables identification of extreme market conditions on the fund or group of funds. It sports a VaR module that creates VaR and benchmarked VaR results and maintains limits on these results. The system also provides comprehensive back testing, analysis and reporting.

Acknowledging that the world is getting smaller, second place runner-up RiskVal offers a platform for Basel II compliance and VaR evaluation in multiple currencies. It provides automated and custom reporting for complex fixed-income portfolios and structured derivative product portfolios.

Third place holder Algorithmics' market risk solutions provide banks with a scalable, integrated risk platform to measure, manage and control capital market exposures across asset and liability functions.

Best Credit Risk Solution Provider

RiskVal Takes Credit

1 RiskVal (18.8%)

2 Algorithmics (10.4%)

3 Murex / Sophis (9.2%)

After the sudden demise of Bear Stearns and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, many firms were given a painful demonstration of the dangers of credit risk. Assets were locked up in bankruptcy proceedings and creditors and trading partners were left hoping their debts would at some point be repaid.

This is the first year Waters has included a Credit Risk Solution category, and it was won by New York-based RiskVal, with 18.8 percent of the votes, with Algorithmics in second with 10.4 percent, and Murex and Sophis tying for third with 9.2 percent each.

RiskVal's credit risk solution, RVCredit, is fully integrated with Markit's pricing and reference data for credit and loan-only default swaps (CDSes and LCDSes), RED and loans and is a complete credit risk system for trading and risk management. The RiskVal Credit solution is powered by Markit's Quote, which provides real-time data into the risk management framework. This helps risk managers achieve better transparency in risk and profit-and-loss (P&L) management. The credit solution also integrates with Markit MTP/DTCC for straight-through processing (STP) for trade confirmation and settlement, making RVCredit a full front-to-back credit derivatives trading platform.

The RiskVal credit solution is used by institutional banks and hedge funds and handles both large and small credit portfolios. RVCredit proved itself able to correctly handle valuation, default event management and risk management throughout the challenging credit markets of 2008, according to the vendor. The RVCredit solution covers single name trades, index and tranche risks, P&L attributions reports, correlation trades and interest rate risks. For each risk report, the graphical user interface (GUI) allows traders or risk managers to flexibly navigate portfolio risks and drill down through the risk reports at the book, strategy, sub-strategy and trade levels to completely analyze their risk.

Best CEP Solution Provider

Complex Events, Simple

1 Aleri/Coral8 and Tibco (22%)

2 Oracle  (17.6%)

3 IBM (11.9%)

Complex event processing (CEP) has a simple premise: Take the incoming data feeds and headlines and evaluate the breaking news to determine the next trading strategy before the competition knows what has happened. Political unrest in an oil-producing nation? A wildcat strike in a tool factory for car makers that are handling bankruptcy? All of this breaking news demands a response.

Nearly all firms use algorithmic trading tools to execute trades faster than humans-why not use CEP to help make decisions faster than a real live head of a trading desk? As one industry observer told Waters, algorithmic trading and CEP can help firms not only find better positions throughout the trading day, it can help those firms exit positions that could lose them money faster.

This year shows signs of true maturity in the complex event processing space. Two CEP solution providers tied for first place in the best CEP provider category: Aleri/Coral8 and Tibco both earned 22 percent of the votes. Last year's winner Oracle accounted for 17.6 percent of votes and in third place, IBM scored 11.6 percent in a hotly contested race. In fact, both winners did not even place in last year's Waters Rankings.

Aleri is clearly showing strength from its recent acquisition of Coral8 that took place earlier this year. Aleri offers a rich set of development tools that allows banks to build and deploy applications rapidly. These tools analyze streaming event data in real-time to deliver what Aleri calls Continuous Intelligence for accurate and up-to-the-minute decisions and these help speed up response times to changing conditions.

Tibco's BusinessEvents solution helps financial services firms identify meaningful patterns within the myriad events and news that has an impact on trading. With the recent release of version 3.0, Tibco aims to expand its reported 40 percent CEP market share, according to an IDC Study.

Best Outsourcing Partner

Infosys Stays on Top

1 Infosys Technologies (24.5%)

2 Wipro (19.6%)

3 Accenture (14%)

The cost-cutting benefits of outsourcing are looking more attractive to financial services firms in the current economic climate. Although investment firms will most likely retain unique core operations, industry observers note that firms will turn to outsourcing operations or ancillary processes. 

Indian outsourcing giant Infosys Technologies takes the Waters Rankings prize for Best Outsourcing Partner for the third year running. Not only did the Bangalore-based vendor win; it opened up a substantial lead over its competition after a close race in 2008. Infosys garnered 24.5 percent of the vote compared to nearest rival Wipro's 19.6 percent and Accenture's 14 percent.

Infosys pioneered the "global delivery model" that provides clients with world-class processes and speed of execution, strategic differentiation and operational superiority. It partners with global clients to provide a complete range of services spanning business and technology consulting, application services, systems integration, product engineering, custom software development, maintenance, re-engineering, independent testing and validation services, IT infrastructure services and business process outsourcing by leveraging its domain and business expertise and strategic alliances with major technology providers.

Infosys' core banking package, Finacle, continues to provide solutions and services that enable a shift in strategic and operational priorities and address the comprehensive technology-led business transformation requirements of corporate and universal banks across the globe. The solution addresses the core banking, e-banking, treasury and wealth management and customer relationship management (CRM) requirements of retail, corporate and universal banks worldwide. Helping firms stretch their IT dollars, the platform offers several powerful and differentiating features that make it one of the most comprehensive, flexible and scalable solutions in its class. This is where Infosys shines.

Wipro has a strong presence in business process outsourcing (BPO) and boasts a staff of more than 19,000 workers. Accenture's outsourcing services include application, infrastructure, and bundled outsourcing which it offers to more than 600 clients.

Best Hosting Provider

BT Is Top in Hosting

1 BT (19.9%)

2 Thomson Reuters (17.3%)

3 Savvis/Linedata Services (16.6%)

Hosting has become a mission-critical component for today's ambitious and competitive investment firms. Selecting a third party to host a trading systems environment is an important matter of trust for investment firms. In this new category, BT won with 19.9 percent of the vote, while Thomson Reuters followed in hot pursuit with 17.3 percent, followed by a tie for third between Savvis and Linedata Services.

BT's hosting capabilities, such as Radianz Proximity Solution, move customers' systems closer to execution venues so that they are at the core of the market, irrespective of where the customer is physically located. This service is available in all major financial centers. It provides access to the world's largest secure networked financial services community-BT's Radianz community-where customers can access over 11,000 financial customer locations and services from over 260 leading providers of applications and content. BT's financial services hosting centers are designed, managed and operated exclusively for participants in the global financial services community. With BT's Radianz Proximity Solution, costs associated with managing and maintaining trading and market data environments, including resources such as hardware, real estate and cooling costs, can be reduced to a single monthly fee.

For customers who want to access the market at record speeds, BT also offers Radianz Ultra Access, a high-speed, fully-resilient capability that can reduce transaction and market data transfer times to the sub-millisecond range.

For smaller investment firms that are turned off by the expense of installing traditional trading turrets, BT offers Hosted Turret Services, with the same functionality but none of the maintenance burden. The core trading infrastructure-BT's Integrated Trading Systems (ITS) Platform-is hosted at a BT datacenter and access is delivered through a secure network. BT's Radianz Shared Market Infrastructure eliminates the need for managing a complex web of connections, direct lines and dedicated circuits. It can consolidate a firm's external connectivity onto a single connection, saving money, time, circuits, equipment, maintenance and management.

Best Trading Turret Provider

IPC in Front

1 IPC (45.9%)

2 BT (36.4%)

3 Orange Business Services (12%)

Even in this age of BlackBerrys and other handheld devices, trading turrets remain a fixture on traders' desks-and more often than not, those turrets have the IPC Systems label. The trading turret and communications technology vendor won 45.9 percent share of the vote over longtime rival BT, which came in second with a strong 36.4 percent of the vote. Orange Business Services came in third with 12 percent.

To meet traders' needs, IPC Systems provides financial services firms worldwide with communications solutions that include Voice over IP (VoIP) technology and integrated network and management services. IPC has been a passionately vocal advocate of VoIP technology in the financial services industry-and it has paid off. The vendor has deployed VoIP solutions to Barclays Capital, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America.

In March, IPC launched Alliance Express, a streamlined trading floor communications system for small and mid-tier firms. The package combines IPC's Alliance MX communications platform with the On-Net trading community. IPC says this will create a complete, end-to-end solution integrating back-office hardware, its IQ/MAX desktop trading turrets and exclusive global network of 3,500 sites.

BT recently expanded further into Asia by signing an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with Hitachi Communications Technologies. Hitachi will distribute BT trading systems and applications to financial services firms in Japan. Along with its VoIP systems, BT offers a soft version of its turret called ITS Anywhere, which operates on IP phones, PCs, mobile phones and BlackBerrys.

Best Back-Office Hardware Provider

IBM in First

1 IBM (33.3%)

2 Hewlett-Packard (32.5%)

3 Oracle/Sun Microsystems (28.1%)

You can't have a back office without a server farm populated by high-performance machines and workstations. Recognizing the role that hardware plays in back office operations, Waters adds a new category to our 2009 Waters Rankings: best back-office hardware provider.

In an incredibly close race, IBM squeezed out victory with 33.3 percent of all votes by beating a hard-charging Hewlett-Packard in second place by just 0.8 percentage points. Oracle/Sun Microsystems made third place with a still respectable 28.1 percent of the vote.

IBM's win comes as no surprise. It has a finger in just about every pie in the back-office hardware space and Big Blue is currently the single largest provider of business and technology solutions to the financial services sector.

Some of the biggest advances of the last year are in the ability to address complex systems, of which the financial markets are a prime example, according to IBM representatives. To achieve this, the hardware giant offers massive processing power through its supercomputer systems.

Beyond high-profile and high-value projects, IBM's bread-and-butter systems are still very much relied upon across the industry. A great deal of IBM's back-office hardware is based upon refined and enhanced versions of technology that has been serving the market for decades. Indeed, the IBM mainframe celebrated its 40th anniversary back in 2004. Nevertheless, it has not rested on its laurels as it retains its preeminent place in the market.

If your firm needs heavy metal in the back office, Big Blue is the one to beat.

Best Data Grid Provider

Big Blue Boosts Data Grids

1 IBM (29.8%)

2 Oracle/Sun Microsystems (26%)

3 DataSynapse (11.1%)

The only thing that can manage the non-stop rush and accumulation of data is a high-performance network that provides the horsepower to make all the information available-and make a small amount of sense of it.

As data emerges as a true concern for CIOs, Waters introduced a new category to highlight the achievements in this important space: Best Data Grid.

IBM took first place with 29.8 percent of votes. In a close second-place showing, Oracle/Sun Microsystems displayed its expertise in readers' eyes with 26 percent of the vote. DataSynapse, the grid solution mainstay, garnered 11.1 percent of all votes. 

In order for a data grid to work, it not only needs fast and reliable CPUs; it needs an infrastructure to handle enormous amounts of data­-that means terabytes and petabytes for even modest-sized investment firms.

Although many banks have collapsed and merged in the past year, the volume of data has not subsided and experts predict it will continue to climb. Firms must fortify their risk exposure in the forthcoming recovery and this means instant access to clean data and servers that can grind the numbers into reports will become even more important.

This is where a data grid comes in. In June, IBM released WebSphere eXtreme Scale 7.0 for financial services firms that need a robust system on which to manage and extrapolate their data. The updated solution offers simple data and database caching that improves application performance and reduces processing time as the user waits for data to arrive.

A near cache provides local, in-process access to data; if the record is not in near cache, it is retrieved from the grid in order to speed up the transaction. Real-time data and event mining helps you manage the flow of real-time events and news as it occurs, and moving application logic adds zero latency.

When it comes to powering your data grid, IBM is on the job.

Best Server Virtualization

A Real Champ in Virtual Race

1 VMWare (34.5%)

2 Microsoft (16.5%)

3 IBM (15.3%)

While risk management is all the rage, another technology has grown in importance and value. When a CIO has to choose about where his or her dwindling IT dollars will go, any option that extends power and saves money is hard to ignore.

Along with cloud computing, server virtualization has ascended from the "let's see" stage to the "get it now" phase.

For the third year in a row, VMWare won in the Best Server Virtualization category in the Waters Rankings. In a display of how tough this race has been, the second and third place winners from last year were wiped out by two established networking giants: IBM, with 16.5 percent of the votes and Microsoft, with 15.3 percent of the votes. Although VMWare's 34.5 percent of the votes is a clear victory, it pales in comparison to the 54 percent of the votes it received last year over GemStone Systems and GigaSpaces.

Squeezing every dime out of a server is the rule of the day, and this is where server virtualization comes to the rescue. Thanks to the way servers are built, the vast majority of its horsepower is not used to the best of its ability; in fact, it mostly resides dormant throughout the trading day. Thanks to virtualization, CPU power can be sent where it is needed in an instant: Say the market surges and calculations have to be made to make sense to the new direction. For large-scale projects-like remodeling a portfolio or calculating risk exposures in a market that has seen more meltdowns beyond the predictions of sober economists-the need for compute power and the ability to make it available has never been more urgent.

VMWare's vSphere solution delivers resources and applications when and where they are needed. According to company claims, VMWare customers save 50 to 70 percent on overall IT costs by consolidating their resource pools. In an era when every IT dollar counts, VMWare is a real winner.

Best Cloud Computing Provider

Microsoft Rules the Cloud

1 Microsoft (33.8%)

2 Google (18.5%)

3 IBM (16.2%)

Investment firms have seen IT budgets shrink while infrastructure and data demands have continued to grow. CIOs have had to rethink how they approach IT, and cloud computing-while still in the early stages of adoption at financial services firms-promises to be a game-changing technology innovation.

To acknowledge this rapidly emerging technology trend, Waters has added the new category of Best Cloud Computing Provider, which was soundly won by Microsoft with 33.8 percent of the votes. Google followed in second with 18.5 percent and IBM took home 16.2 percent.

Microsoft has several offerings in the cloud computing space, starting with the Windows Azure Services platform, which it calls its foundational cloud computing operating system. Products such as .Net Services: services bus, workflow and identity management; SQL Services: database in the cloud; and Live Services: consumer-based services in the cloud such as Virtual Earth, all run atop Azure.

The software giant also offers Microsoft Online Services-cloud versions of on-premises Microsoft software that run in cloud datacenters on top of Azure. These include Dynamics CRM Online, which competes with Salesforce.com, and Office Live Meeting for cloud-based Web conferencing, and SharePoint Online for collaboration and workflow management. For these services, the back end is linked to the cloud and the front end can either run in a pure browser, such as Outlook Web Access, or be installed locally as a desktop application connected to the cloud.

Other related online services include Tellme, a cloud-based interactive voice response platform, and Windows Live, a consumer services platform in the cloud for services such as Web-based e-mail, social networking platform People, instant messenger and photo gallery. Microsoft also offers online data storage capabilities as well as cloud-enabled basic versions of popular Office applications. The trend is clear-software is moving to the cloud. -->