"It's widely known in the industry that Eagle is committed to research and development of our products, and this release represents many years of continuous investment. As a result, this latest version offers new functionality around supporting complex instrument types," said John Lehner, President of Eagle Investment Systems. "We've also expanded our technical platforms and feel that when clients are ready to upgrade to a new platform, we're ready to help them make that transition. We have already seen a number of clients move toward upgrading on Linux."

Eagle continually evaluates and integrates new technologies to support and enhance the system architecture that underlies its investment management solutions. V9.0 supports current versions of operating systems and databases to ensure higher availability, enhanced performance and a secure foundation to run all applications. This latest version supports Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and Linux operating systems and Oracle 10g and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 databases.

The functionality enhancements in V9.0 were based on a number of factors including input from clients and necessary support for changing industry regulations. New functionality has been added across all of Eagle solutions.

• Data Management offers improved usability across the workflows, providing instinctive navigation. It also offers a redesigned rules editor for more intuitive interaction. New features include the ability to handle multi-leg swaps for derivatives, a pricing option for direct access to pricing information and the ability to make modifications, which enables access to readily-available audit information.
• Investment Accounting delivers new functionality to support the processsing and settlement of swaps. New features were added to Eagle's Mutual Fund Accounting solution to support clients that work with third party administrators and investment managers. This latest version provides the ability to conduct more in-depth analysis of data for dissemination to a client's various audiences. For Eagle's Insurance Accounting solution, the latest version supports the most recent directives from regulators.
• The Performance Measurement suite now provides a dynamic performance analysis capability. This functionality was introduced to enable clients to regroup and filter security level performance at any time to support ad hoc analysis. The workflow around the GIPS® composite management module now enables an end-to-end solution to help clients maintain the composite through an automated process all the way through to creating necessary disclosures. The performance attribution module was expanded to include additional methodologies that helps meet both client and evolving industry requirements for both equity and fixed income attribution models.
• Information Delivery, a key component of the data management solution, which provides capabilities for reporting and dissemination of information, delivers a number of new packaged options for viewing and receiving information in V9.0. The solution was enhanced to allow more points of flexibility to enable clients to generate multiple views of data through the Eagle Data Mart, a tool enabling users to define their universe of reportable data and, in turn, deliver this enriched data to any downstream system or application.

Separately, Eagle Investment Systems LLC, a leading provider of financial services technology and a subsidiary of The Bank of New York Mellon, today announced that Ark Asset Management Co., Inc. (Ark), a leading investment management firm in the institutional marketplace, will transition its installation of the Eagle investment management suite, which is currently managed in-house, to the Eagle ACCESS application service provider.

In 2003, Ark implemented Eagle's data management, accounting, and performance solutions to leverage the advanced functionality, flexibility and scalability they provided. Since then, Ark has incrementally shifted its technology strategy from internally managing its middle- and back-office systems to a total outsource model. The migration to Eagle ACCESS will be the final step in the process. Once completed, it will allow the firm to focus on growing its asset management business, improving its IT infrastructure and reducing its number of committed resources.

"When we began our relationship with Eagle years ago, our initial goal was to acquire a data management, performance and investment accounting system that offered flexibility, ease-of-use and scalability, and Eagle's solutions have certainly met this need," said Gillian Plastaras, chief administrative officer of Ark Asset Management Co., Inc. "As our firm has evolved, we have shifted our focus to leveraging Eagle's robust solutions to our maximum benefit, without the costs and need for additional resources dedicated to managing and maintaining an in-house platform."

Since 2004, Ark has outsourced all of its IT and middle- and back-office operations to iX Partners, including Ark's technology-related staffing, vendor management and service delivery requirements. iX Partners will continue managing the remaining in-house technology and will interface directly with Eagle ACCESS on Ark's behalf.

"For a few years now, Ark has been using hosted and outsourced solutions to run its IT and investment operations," said Paul Cucurullo, managing partner of iX Partners. "This is Ark's next step in the direction of moving all systems off site to allow its business leaders to focus on core business competencies. As a strategic partner of Ark's we will use our Eagle and investment management operations expertise to leverage Eagle ACCESS' outstanding capabilities and to continue in our strategic and tactical role with Ark."

"In today's economic state, we have noticed a trend where many firms like Ark want to concentrate on core business needs and allow service providers to manage the scheduled upgrades, disaster recovery, and other technology requirements," said John Lehner, president of Eagle. "By leveraging the Eagle ACCESS model, Ark will be able to reduce its infrastructure overhead and repurpose those resources toward expanding its business and servicing investors."

Separately, Eagle Investment Systems LLC, a leading provider of financial services technology and a subsidiary of The Bank of New York Mellon, today announced that Eagle ACCESS, its application service provider is currently available on Sun Microsystems' SolarisTM 10 Operating System (OS).

With availability on the Solaris 10 OS, Eagle is better able to deliver robust hosted solutions with a high level of performance and availability to clients. Eagle ACCESS has taken full advantage of the Solaris 10 OS to support its Eagle ACCESS clients and offer them lower operational costs due to the many administrative tools available. The system enables a streamlined approach to managing multiple servers across an organization due to Solaris 10 OS's modern and efficient operating structure.

"Eagle is committed to significant research and development of our products and solutions, but we are equally committed to compatibility with the leading solutions that support both of our hosted and installed solutions," said Marc Firenze, Eagle's chief development officer. "Our clients are sophisticated and demand leading solutions to help achieve the highest level of performance and availability necessary to run their investment management solutions successfully."

"Financial technology firms must continuously provide their clients enhanced service offerings with high performance and high availability and scalability," said Juan Carlos Soto, vice president of global market development and engineering, Sun Microsystems. "By deploying their ASP solutions on Solaris, Eagle Investment Systems is best positioned to meet customers' needs today and into the future."