Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Buy-Side Data Management Product—Cadis EDM

If you’re looking for an example on which to base a new technology firm, you could do a lot worse than follow the Cadis blueprint: It has a great product, it prides itself on its service levels—Cadis, for example, has the distinction of never having lost a client once contracts have been inked, the only technology vendor that, to our knowledge, can legitimately make this claim—and it continues to boast some of the most driven, reliable, and yet most likeable people in the industry. While those ingredients might not necessarily guarantee you success, not having them will almost certainly guarantee you failure.

Cadis, headquartered in the UK, with satellite offices in Boston, Tokyo, Luxembourg, Sydney, Paris and Hong Kong, continues its inexorable growth: Sales and marketing director Stuart Plane moved to Hong Kong just under a year ago to head up the firm’s Asia-Pacific business, and in the first week of November this year, it announced the opening of a Paris office.

Cadis has matured appreciably from the young upstart that emerged from the disintegration of its parent Citadel Associates in early 2008. It earned its stripes scrapping with the larger, better established members of the data management community—GoldenSource, Eagle Investment Systems, Asset Control, and Netik—for every deal, and now finds itself in the position where it can genuinely consider itself to be the pre-eminent specialist in this space. The Cadis EDM (Enterprise Data Management) platform has, after all, won the best data management product in the Buy-Side Technology Awards for the past five consecutive years, only the second organization that can make such a claim, along with Advent. And whereas in the past, Cadis’ focus was squarely on the buy side, this is no longer the case—according to Daniel Simpson, the firm’s CEO, there is now an almost 50–50 split between the sell side and buy side in terms of new clients.

In the second quarter of this year, Cadis launched Version 8 of its EDM platform, which enhances the user experience through the provision of an intuitive interface, showing only the information a user wants, with complete “slice and dice” analysis, audit and trace. Version 8 is designed to provide a best-practice solution requiring minimal configuration and increased ease-of-use. According to Cadis, the EDM platform’s success is down to the firm’s unique approach to data management: a central data hub that puts quality, traceable data at the centre of the organization, a strategy that is more common sense than rocket science, but one that continues to serve Cadis so well. —VBA