n-ZO in Capital Markets
Fierce competition and volatile market conditions are driving both buy-side and sell-side firms towards information-centric business strategies that enable efficient management of enterprise data and provide the agility to respond to critical business events. Furthermore, impending regulatory compliance mandates and current technology trends are forcing most financial IT organizations to look at newer data management strategies and architectures.

n-ZO Enterprise Information Fabric can help financial service providers combat these burgeoning challenges and increase their profitability by ensuring operational efficiency at warp speeds, enhancing and optimizing risk and analytics infrastructures, and guaranteeing improved customer intimacy. n-ZO provides a reliable information infrastructure to deal with the data deluge caused by increased electronic trading and regulatory requirements. Its distributed data infrastructure with instantaneous and non-stop data availability can enhance operations in throughout the front, middle, and back office.

n-ZO for Trading
Electronic trading is becoming more and more prevalent not just in the equities world but across the board - fixed income, derivatives, and foreign exchange markets are witnessing similar trends. Furthermore, direct market access has also increased the volume of trades that have to be processed, especially around market close. Such trends necessitate an ultra-low-latency data infrastructure that can distribute the required information instantaneously to the different systems of a trading platform. Guaranteeing a low level of latency is also critical for trade executions at favorable price points, especially post-decimalization, when liquidity at specific price points has dropped significantly.

Characterized by high-performance data access, real-time analytics of market data streams, and data distribution capabilities, the n-ZO Enterprise Information Fabric can not only improve the throughput of an electronic trading platform but also provides reliable mechanisms to replicate and persist order/trade data for failover to guarantee a non-stop trading environment. The n-ZO Trading Reference Architecture offers a quick and easy approach for firms to implement such a data platform within 90 days.

Such an infrastructure is highly critical to support complex analytics - pre-trade and post-trade - that rely on extremely fast data access. n-ZO's real-time analytics and streaming data management capabilities enable analysis of market data on a continuous basis to drive profitable trading. Similar benefits can also be reaped in pricing workflow and analytics in foreign exchange
and derivative markets.

n-ZO for Risk Management and Analytics
Enterprise risk management, whether it's operational, credit, or market risk, is a data initiative. Having good data on a timely basis is the key to good decision-making. Risk management is continuing to grow as a high-priority initiative, especially among financial service providers, as these organizations strive to minimize their exposures to potential economic loss. Market events, regulatory compliance, and new products and services have challenged today's financial institutions to do more with less. Financial institutions are constantly in need of information from a variety of sources to instantaneously assess their exposure to risk and identify opportunities that offer higher margins with a relatively lower risk.

The n-ZO Enterprise Information Fabric can bolster risk management infrastructures by providing a virtualized risk information layer that guarantees high-performance data access and high data availability as well. n-ZO can also enable real-time risk analytics and user-defined computations on streaming market data. Compute grids that have been designed for risk analytics and Greek computations are often bogged down by data latency issues. Hence, they cannot scale to a greater number of nodes when data volumes and data complexity increase. n-ZO can enable a data grid deployment for risk computation infrastructures that can virtualize, scale, and guarantee information on demand.

n-ZO for Reference Data
Inconsistent, inaccurate, or incomplete reference data is the primary cause for trade failures in the financial services industry. Exceptions in the trade lifecycle caused by unreliable reference data lead to increased operational risk, lost revenue opportunities, financial liability, and the need for expensive manual trade duplication and reconciliation processes. Since artificial system delays are often introduced to make allowances for poor reference data systems, these systems are notorious for limiting the efficiency improvements in trade process automation.

n-ZO for Market Data Analysis and Distribution
Market data is often the lifeline of most trading environments. In most environments, however, market data infrastructures are characterized by the following problems:

The n-ZO Enterprise Information Fabric provides a high-performance backbone for managing market data in a standards-based, distributed fashion, making features such as pricing with no latency available to trading desks and other applications. Such an approach minimizes and isolates the usage of multiple legacy protocols and formats that are constantly changing. The n-ZO Enterprise Information Fabric can also enable intelligent querying, analytics, and computations on market data like VWAP, Moving Averages, Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) and Bollinger Bands.

These in turn can be utilized to craft a gamut of trading strategies starting from simple spreads, pairs, and statistical arbitrage to more complex and exotic strategies involving correlation with other data sources and historical data. The products that make up the n-ZO Enterprise Information Fabric can be introduced with little effort and can be scaled in a market data environment with ease.

Benefits of n-ZO include:

  • Avoids Redundant Disk and Database Access.
    n-ZO virtualizes distributed data dynamically across the hardware and software boundaries of the enterprise.
  • Enables Cross-Application Collaboration.
    n-ZO increases performance by enabling distributed in-memory, cross application, data exchange via C, Java, or XML. Performance significantly increases when data is cached in-memory instead of staged in a database.
  • Positions Data Close to Point of Use
    n-ZO enhances the performance of portals, applications, application servers and systems by storing data that is accessed multiple times by programs, groups of users or by a single user who is massaging the data.
  • Reduce Network Load
    Caching data close to point of use prevents unnecessary re-transmission of data across the network for each user. This contributes to a reduction in network load.
  • Enhances Survivability of Distributed Applications
    The distributed n-ZO cache enables applications to continue to work with data that was retrieved before a network outage.
  • Turbo-charges Web Services-Based Applications
    n-ZO significantly enhances XML performance in a Web services environment. It stores XML documents in optimized cache, thus minimizing data access time and storage space in memory. This is one of the critical challenges in a Web Services implementation.
  • Boosts performance and scalability for Java Applications
    n-ZO enables Java applications to access additional memory outside of their process space and thus manipulates more data.
  • Enable Multiple Computers to Seamlessly Share Memory
    n-ZO can create a data-space that spans multiple computers memories. This capability can be used to allow n-ZO caches on 32 bit computers to share memory with 64 bit computers that are virtually unlimited in the amount of memory they can address. This capability can also be used to allow computers in a Grid of blade server environment to appear to have a single large memory space, instead of having a group of disjointed individual memory spaces.

n-ZO Industry Solutions
 Organizations across various industries are bracing for changes that will help them increase their operational efficiency, profitability, and customer service while minimizing risk. However, data management is a significant hurdle to success. n-ZO solutions offer the necessary ingredients to help companies align information strategies with critical business initiatives. 
Learn more about how n-ZO can help address the data management needs in the following industries: