Pink OTC Markets Inc. Cuts Reporting Time, Hardware and Programming Costs with Data Warehouse Built on Vertica and Syncsort

BILLERICA, Massachusetts and WOODCLIFF LAKE, New Jersey -

- Operator of Leading OTC Securities Marketplace Sees Major Savings with World Record Solution

Pink OTC Markets Inc., the company that operates the OTCQX and Pink Sheets over-the-counter equity marketplace, has slashed the time it takes to generate market reports from hours to seconds while also saving big on reduced hardware and programming costs, thanks to a business intelligence (BI) data warehouse solution built with the Vertica Analytic Database and Syncsort’s DMExpress(TM) data integration software.

As the third largest U.S. equity trading marketplace, Pink OTC needed to improve its reporting capability to stay ahead of the millions of records its trading system amasses daily. The company connects OTC marketplace participants, providing a quotation and trading platform for FINRA member broker-dealers, market data for OTC participants, and disclosure services for issuers with securities traded on the OTC market. An important element in keeping this diverse set of clients happy is Pink OTC’s ability to quickly generate reports for up-to-the-minute market analysis.

“Better reporting results in increased customer satisfaction,” explained Rahul Bose, director of application development at Pink OTC. “By filtering, analyzing and aggregating historical and streaming financial data into easily accessible reports, we provide our customers with actionable intelligence they can turn into opportunity.”

With the relentless growth in messaging rates characteristic of modern electronic trading systems, Pink OTC management faced a challenge of rapid delivery of new services to its customers that would provide real-time insight into the market trends hidden within the growing volumes of trade, quote and company financial data.

The company evaluated a solution pairing Vertica and Syncsort alongside the Informix and InfoBright databases. With a data store of over a billion records and expanding rapidly at several million records a day, Pink OTC faced a huge investment in data warehouse and storage area network (SAN) hardware, software, and integration effort going the traditional route. Pink OTC decided on a Vertica-Syncsort solution for three key reasons:

- it’s ability to execute complex queries and generate reports up to 100X faster than some other offerings, - the large savings the company gained in reduced hardware and programming costs, and - superior customer service.

The Vertica Analytic Database relies on a unique columnar, MPP architecture and pioneering data compression to reduce storage requirements for the Pink OTC data warehouse by as much as 90 percent, eliminating the need for a large SAN that would need to be upgraded every 12-18 months. The Vertica Analytic Database can operate directly on that compressed data, delivering query results exponentially faster than other systems evaluated.

Syncsort’s DMExpress dramatically reduces the time for processing Pink OTC’s high daily data volumes with high-performance extraction, transformation and load (ETL). Together, these technologies power an easy-to-use data warehouse that enables Pink OTC’s analysts and developers to load, transform and generate complex reports on large volumes of data with minimal effort. In 2008 Syncsort’s DMExpress set a new ETL world record and broke the 1 GB per second barrier, to extract, transform, and load 5.4 TB of raw TPC-H data into a Vertica Analytic Database at an unprecedented rate of 1.6 GB per second — all while deployed on highly cost-efficient HP c7000 Blade servers.

Custom reports for market aggregates, securities, trades and other market intelligence that used to take a team of Java programmers days to code can now be done in minutes by any analyst who knows a little about SQL queries.

“Pink OTC Markets leverages best-of-breed technologies to drive a highly efficient OTC market at lower cost than traditional securities exchanges,” said Bose. “We’re all about connecting traders, improving price discovery and providing better intelligence to our customers. The Vertica-Syncsort solution solved a big data analytics challenge at a fraction of cost and with much better performance than traditional database systems.”

About Syncsort Incorporated

Syncsort is a global software company that speeds data processing, data integration, and data protection & recovery. Supported by a professional services team built on 40 years of expertise, Syncsort helps customers drive ROI with software solutions that combine high performance, optimal hardware utilization, and ease of use. With over 12,000 deployments worldwide, Syncsort customers include 96 of the Fortune 100 companies. Syncsort is headquartered in Woodcliff Lake, NJ, and has international subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, with support centers in the United States and Netherlands. An international network of partners, resellers and distributors positions Syncsort products as an integral component of IT solutions. For more information call +1-201-930-8200 (1-877-FAST-951 in the US and Canada) or visit: www.syncsort.com.

About Vertica

Vertica Systems is the market innovator for high-performance analytic database management systems that run on industry-standard hardware. Co-founded by database pioneer Dr. Michael Stonebraker, Vertica has developed column-oriented analytic database technology with an MPP architecture that lets companies of any size store and query very large databases orders of magnitude faster and more affordably than other solutions. The Vertica Analytic Database is available as software only, as a hardware based appliance, as a virtual appliance on VMware or online as a cloud computing solution. The technology’s unmatched speed, scalability, flexibility and ease of use helps customers like JP Morgan Chase, Verizon, Mozilla, Comcast, Level(3) Communications and Vonage capitalize on business opportunities in real time. Vertica is headquartered in Billerica, Mass. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.vertica.com.

Source: Vertica

Ed Marshall of Beaupre & Co. Public Relations for Vertica, +1-603-559-5816, emarshall at beaupre.com