The vendor bills the platform as a consolidated risk and trade data repository capable of capturing and consolidating high-volume market data feeds with massive historical data sets for faster, more effective trading applications.

The platform uses the Sybase IQ analytical engine to provide query performance up to 100 times faster than traditional RDBMS systems, claims the firm, decreasing the volume of data stored by up to 70%. The system simplifies implementation by incorporating Sybase's PowerDesigner PhysicalArchitect modelling tool, and a pre-built financial data model.

Dean Marchetti, director of engineering, Sybase says: "With Sybase Risk Analytics Platform, we deliver a unique consolidated risk and trade data repository that is actually capable of capturing and consolidating volumes of real-time market data and deep historical data to support more effective, near real-time trading analytics. This allows our customers to spot trends and opportunities buried in the data and act on them ahead of the competition."

Capital markets firms currently using Sybase IQ as the engine to support their risk analytics and trading solutions include eSpeed, Millennium Partners, Citigroup and Investment Technology Group, Inc. (ITG).

Szafran Athey, first vice president and head of CIB Tech Frankfurt, a unit of Citigroup that provides IT services, says of the new platform: "With Sybase IQ, we were able to get shorter response times, even when querying very large data volumes, plus the data is stored very efficiently due to high compression rates. A large number of new analyses have become possible that no one would have thought to produce in the past due to the time and cost involved."

Sybase Risk Analytics Platform is currently available in a development and testing version, as well as the full deployment version.