SunGard Combines Fame, MarketMap Data

SunGard will move its Fame and MarketMap data displays and feeds to a single infrastructure for sourcing and delivering data later this year, as part of its initiative to combine the products under the MarketMap brand and provide a unified suite of real-time market data and delivery tools.

The vendor acquired MarketMap with its 2008 purchase of French data and trading systems vendor GL Trade (IMD, Aug. 4, 2008), which had its own market connections, overlapping with Fame’s existing connectivity to the same sources.

Consolidating its connections to data sources will enable SunGard to reduce instances where it receives multiple feeds of the same information, and ensure it delivers consistent data across its services—whether clients receive the data via MarketMap or its datafeed products, says Tony Scianna, executive vice president of product management and marketing for SunGard’s Brokerage and Clearance division.

“It’s a matter of making sure that when we get the data, we get it once, and then it gets distributed via our feed as well as our MarketMap terminal base,” Scianna says. He expects the project—for which planning began last year (IMD, Feb. 13, 2009) ahead of the actual migration this year—to be complete by the end of 2010.

In addition to overlap in connectivity, some global data sources were available via one product but not the other, whereas the vendor will now be able to make all data within MarketMap available via Fame, and vice versa, by leveraging its GL Net data and broker-routing network, which also enables SunGard to reduce its reliance on data from other vendors, Scianna says.

In addition, SunGard is consolidating different datasets onto separate infrastructures for distributing data, and will use the existing MarketMap infrastructure to support delivery of all data—including Fame content—to the MarketMap terminal, while leveraging the Fame infrastructure to support dissemination of all its datafeeds so users can access all the vendor’s data via both its terminals and datafeeds.

SunGard will retain the Fame brand to encompass its Fame time-series analytic database and products for managing time-series data to support quantitative groups and research departments within banks and hedge funds involved in building, back-testing and running trading models.