Operations Newsflashes: SunGard Survey Uncovers Lack of Disaster Prepearedness, and more

Asset Control Supports Sun Operating System

Asset Control, the world's leading provider of Centralized Data Management (CDM) solutions to the financial industry, recently announced its support for Sun's award-winning Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) running on Sun's Sun Fire servers powered by AMD Opteron processors. The Solaris 10 OS offers improved security, stability and performance, all at a lower total cost of ownership in which to run the Asset Control product suite for standardized reference data and market data management solutions across the enterprise.

"As a leading operating system, the Solaris 10 OS provides the reliability of an enterprise platform at commodity pricing," said David Hirschfeld, senior vice president of operations at Asset Control. "A number of financial institutions have expressed an interest in a move to cost-effective computing platforms. Our goal for extending to the x64 platform is to offer a lower total cost of ownership and the widest range of platform options available to support the entire life cycle of data management."

SunGard Survey Uncovers Lack of Disaster Preparedness

A new study commissioned by SunGard Availability Services and conducted by Harris Interactive has uncovered a major confidence gap in disaster preparedness for the companies surveyed. The senior executive respondents say that, while their companies' ability to deliver continuous information availability during a disaster is getting better, they still cannot give their abilities a high grade.

In the survey of U.S.-based senior executives, about one-half (46 percent) of the respondents indicate their companies are more prepared compared to last year in their ability to access business-critical data in the event of a disaster. Yet, almost four in 10 (39 percent) of respondents provide grades at a C or lower for their capabilities, citing deficiencies such as inconsistent practices, lack of preparedness and competing priorities.

The percentage of senior executive respondents giving low grade ratings is increasing, compared to similar surveys from the last two years, commissioned by SunGard Availability Services and conducted by Harris Interactive. In 2004, only 24 percent of respondents graded their organizations at a C or lower, unveiling the disturbing trend that U.S. businesses are getting worse at disaster preparedness, not better.

Markitt Purchase Bolsters Structured Securities

Markit Group Limited, a provider of benchmark data, portfolio valuations and trade processing for the OTC derivative markets, has acquired Chasen Enterprises. Chasen provides accurate, high quality modeling of structured securities, notably agency and non-agency Collateralized Mortgage Obligations ("CMO") and Asset-Backed Securities ("ABS").

"The acquisition of Chasen demonstrates Markit's commitment to support the structured finance markets, particularly with respect to the valuation of synthetic ABS instruments," said Kevin Gould, executive vice president and head of data products and analytics at Markit. "The CDS of ABS market is growing rapidly and we are seeing an ever-increasing demand for benchmark data and independent valuations for this product."

Markit will leverage Chasen's structured finance expertise to develop further its Reference Cashflow Database (RCD). RCD will launch later this year and will be used as the central monitoring and settlement platform for the CDS of ABS market. Markit's ABX calculator, which is used for settlement of the ABX index trades and is free to market participants, will also benefit from enhanced functionality. "We are very excited about becoming a part of Markit, a firm that has helped to build liquidity in the sub-prime residential mortgage market through ABX," said Andrew Chasen, founder and president of Chasen. "We look forward to contributing our modeling expertise in order to provide the investment community with the tools needed to analyze synthetic ABS."

Markit brought price transparency to the European ABS market with the launch of the first independent ABS pricing service in November 2005. Chasen has been offering software and services to the structured finance sector since 1989.