Author: Faye Kilburn
Source: Inside Market Data | 03 Jul 2014
Categories: Data Display & Analytics | Data Delivery Technologies
Atlanta, GA-based decision support analytics provider Lucena Research is migrating the infrastructure behind its QuantDesk predictive analytics platform to the Amazon Web Services cloud, to provide greater scalability to support its expanding customer base of wealth advisors, registered investment advisors and portfolio managers.
The migration encompasses all components of Lucena’s QuantDesk platform, including Price Forecaster, which predicts prices for user-defined portfolios based on historical stock price behavior; Portfolio Optimizer, which determines the optimal allocation of funds across portfolio holdings to maximize returns within user-defined parameters; Hedge Finder, which identifies stocks to act as a hedge against downturns in the market or other holdings; and Event Analyzer, which enables customers to create and analyze the impact of technical events.
The vendor will also migrate its historical database of more than 120 fundamental and technical indicators and 38,000 equity histories that feeds the QuantDesk platform.
Previously, Lucena employed a smaller, unnamed cloud provider to support and maintain its infrastructure in multiple locations around the world. However, the vendor decided to move to Amazon’s cloud after Amazon Web Servicesexpanded its offering to support more compute-intensive technology systems such as QuantDesk, says Lucena co-founder and chief executive Erez Katz.
“Amazon has powerful infrastructure that allows you to associate multiple virtual locations around the world with a click of button. Recently, Amazon expanded its services to allow more powerful machines─such as the ones we use in our infrastructure─and that was the tipping point. We are moving our entire infrastructure to Amazon’s cloud as we speak,” Katz says.
Lucena is currently moving its entire historical database into the Amazon cloud, a full-time of data transformation, which is due to be completed at the end of this week. The migration will have no detrimental impact on service for clients, and instead will deliver faster processing times for back-testing and CPU-intensive operations, Katz adds.
Scalability
Along with cost savings and accessibility to Amazon’s support services, the migration will also provide Lucena with the scalability it needs to support growing numbers of clients. “The way the cloud works is that if you have strong demand on CPU cycles, it automatically adds news CPUs,” Katz says. “Truly, the migration will help us to support a larger customer base than we’ve had prior to now.”
In addition, the migration will enable Lucena to more easily support higher volumes of data when it expands its QuantDesk platform beyond US equities to other regions─including Europe and Asia─and other asset classes, such as derivatives and fixed income next year.
To source the data, Lucena expects to tap its existing partnerships with a number of unnamed data vendors, which provide predictive and fundamental data, economic indicators and proprietary data.
“Many suppliers of this type of information are limited─in terms of their customer base─to quantitative analysts, who can make sense of the data in raw format. We enable businesspeople, such as portfolio managers, wealth advisors, etc., to extract the same value as mathematicians. So, in short, we offer a compelling proposition to the data providers that have been confined to selling to a relatively small market of quants, as we help them expand their reach to a completely new and substantial client base,” Katz says.
View the post at: Lucena Moves QuantDesk Databases to Amazon Cloud
