StreamBase and Vertica Launches Customer Deployment at BlueCrest

BlueCrest Capital Management, a European hedge fund with over $15 billion in assets-under-management, has deployed their technologies in a StreamBase and Vertica real-time market data management application infrastructure. BlueCrest is the first public endorsement to come as a result of the partnership between the two firms.

BlueCrest’s market data management infrastructure aggregates fixed income, equities, FX and related derivatives, exotic commodities, energy, and alternative asset classes. It stores each tick in the Vertica analytic database and using StreamBase calculates real-time analytics against the historic data in Vertica, ranging from simple data like last trade price to complex event-based analytics like volatility surfaces and correlation signals with time windows. The resulting system provides a firm-wide infrastructure to access, conflate, enrich, and distribute market data with minimal latency and assured compliance, in real-time.

“Great data management is as important to us as great quantitative trading models,” said Justo Ruiz-Ferrer, head of trading strategy systems and quantitative development at BlueCrest, in a press release. He added, “The combination of StreamBase and Vertica enables us to get a low-latency, aggregated view of ‘everything that ticks’ in the increasingly complicated, fragmented, high-speed financial markets. Their joint solution helped us get to market quickly and, more importantly, change our system quickly in response to new opportunities. We save weeks to months with each market or analytic we add, and that helps us capture trading advantage while it’s most lucrative. It enables our 24-hour global trading operations, and helps us optimize our market data licensing, all at once.”

“BlueCrest’s innovation is further evidence that complex event processing (CEP) and analytic databases are becoming a critical piece of the broader electronic trading landscape. It’s not just for algorithmic trading anymore,” said StreamBase CEO Mark Palmer, in the release. “In the turbulent financial markets of today, firms are looking for smarter ways to optimize their market data. BlueCrest’s system illustrates an innovative market data management approach that provides competitive trading advantage and cost optimization at the same time,” he said.

“The integration between Vertica and StreamBase gives firms the flexibility, time-to-market, and performance needed in these volatile times,” added Vertica CEO Ralph Breslauer, in the release. “The Vertica-StreamBase partnership allows firms such as BlueCrest to rapidly develop highly adaptable real-time market data management systems, capable of storing and analyzing terabytes of market data from multiple venues and data sources with orders of magnitude faster performance than other solutions and at much lower cost,” he added.