The Quintessential IP Integration Platform
Let’s talk about integrating your company’s intellectual property and what this actually means. I wrote multiple articles showcasing the various functional features in Quintessence. Most of these incorporate the data middleware facet. In this article, ‘Solutions for the Enterprise Architect’ – I focus on a unique Quintessence feature, the function middleware facet. In particular, I showcase an implementation where the primary objective was to integrate and surface the company’s IP encapsulated in code to various environments.
The enterprise architect at an asset manager had a very challenging problem statement. Her problem was that the investment managers, quant-team and marketing department all required live access to current and historical portfolio information. These users needed the holdings, daily total returns and sector exposures for the various funds managed by the company on a daily basis. The various teams used their own methodology to construct this data, accessing the various in-house warehouses through a variety of systems. The outcome was that the same request (e.g. a specific fund’s holding as of the close of business yesterday) resulted in the different teams having different results!
The fund managers used Excel. They would email IT for the information they needed. IT would respond with an Excel file containing the said holdings of a fund. The quant-team programmed their own queries in Matlab. These queries accessed the historical administrative database and the live trading platform to arrive at a real-time instrument exposure for any fund queried. The marketing teams used QlikView, accessing the data by coupling to stored procedures built by a third-party IT contractor. The primary challenge was that different tools were used by the various departments and that they were all getting different data for effectively the same request.
Quintessence was implemented as their enterprise architectural solution, enabling a single function to be configured and made available to the multiple platforms used across the organisation.
The architect guided the in-house developers to code a Portfolio() function in C#. This function was designed to satisfy all users’ requirements. In particular, a specific parameter in the function specified whether the current day’s trades must be incorporated in the exposure request. Another parameter specified whether a look-through algorithm (which consolidated all positions) was implemented when the fund contained other funds.
The power of Quintessence came to the fore in the fact that this custom-built function could be registered through Quintessence and made available to all tools that couple onto the Quintessence Presentation Layer. Thus users could access this function in Excel, QlikView, Tableau, PowerBI, MATLAB and R. The IT team now needed to only maintain the one function to ensure that everyone had access to the identical information across the organisation.
The example showcases how an architect used Quintessence to ensure universal access and consistency of the data and IP distributed throughout the organisation.
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