Systems/Enterprise:

PAREMUS ENHANCES PRICING, RISK ANALYTICS SOLUTION

Paremus announced the addition of Quadrus Financial Technologies Inc and Sun Microsystems Inc to the recently revealed Infiniflow Utility Datacenter Ecosystem (UDE). When integrated with the Infiniflow enterprise compute fabric, the high performance Quadrus QuIC Platform running on Sun's ground-breaking Solaris 10 Operating System for x86 systems, provides financial services companies with an adaptive and highly scalable state-of-the art utility pricing and risk management solution for the whole enterprise.

"Paremus regards the Quadrus vector processing risk engine as a best-in-class solution for the financial services industry, hence integration into the Infiniflow autonomic compute fabric was an obvious UDE priority," said Richard Nicholson, CTO of Paremus. "The resultant UDE solution is really quite special, enabling our clients to deliver a massively scalable and self-healing enterprise risk management utility service to their businesses."

The Quadrus system can perform tasks in seconds that can take other systems hours to complete. It also offers users the ability to dynamically extend and customize system functionality to handle even the most complex financial models, instruments and analytics. This capability is typically limited by conventional "stove-piped" architectures -- including compute Grids -- where resources cannot be shared by applications. Infiniflow enterprise resource virtualization allows many business aligned Quadrus processing domains to be dynamically instantiated from the single compute fabric, avoiding islands of underutilized resources and improving return on investment in servers.

In addition to providing a compute Grid architecture to address computationally intensive workloads, Infiniflow's ability to handle work-flows means it can support other processing patterns required by a financial services company. These include high data throughput and transaction processing, complex business workflow and orchestration, and high performance distributed matching engine requirements.

Risk management applications are critical to the day-to-day operation of many financial services organizations, and the Infiniflow enterprise Grid provides the ideal resilient environment for the QuIC Platform. Infiniflow's Jini technology-based service oriented architecture has unprecedented self-healing and business service recovery behaviors. Unlike conventional compute Grid implementations, Infiniflow has no central point of control, hence no central point of failure. Such capabilities will prove invaluable as financial services organizations begin to address the Technology Operational Risk requirements within the Basel II specification.

"The partnership between Paramus and Quadrus, puts the power of the Quadrus QuIC Platform in reach of an entire autonomic distributed compute foundation," said Justin Forrest, vice president of business development at Quadrus. "By leveraging Infiniflow's virtual domain architecture, QuIC Platform resources can be rapidly re-provisioned to meet the requirements of the most demanding front and middle office pricing and risk management challenges."

Hosted upon Sun Microsystems' Sun Fire V20z and V40z servers based on the AMD Opteron processor and running the Solaris 10 OS, the Quadrus/Infiniflow environment provides unprecedented scalable compute and data throughput processing power, whilst leveraging the established stability, manageability and industry leading performance of the Solaris 10 operating system.

"The Quadrus QuIC risk engine has been engineered for the industry leading vector analytics performance. Likewise, Infiniflow leverages Sun Java/Jini infrastructure to set new levels of throughput performance, flexibility and resilience for enterprise transactional, message matching and compute Grid solutions," said Donna Rubin, senior director of financial services at Sun Microsystems Inc. "As such, the combination of the Sun Fire V20z and V40z AMD Opteron-based processors powered by Solaris 10 and Quadrus/Paremus represents a powerful Grid architecture for market risk."

"The combination of Infiniflow, QuIC and Sun's Opteron processor based-systems will be presented to our City of London clients at the SunLive 2004 event '36 Hours in the City' on Nov. 30," said Mike Francis, business development manager for Paremus. "This compelling utility pricing and risk service solution is the first of many exciting solutions to be announced as part of the Infiniflow Utility Datacenter Ecosystem."