With this release, Cicada launches its new Composer Workplace, which adds integrated workflow management to the company's data management architecture, Cicada Composer® plus+.

Developed using Cicada's experience in providing solutions for managing security, legal entity/counterparty and pricing reference data, Composer Workplace is designed to facilitate data review processes and manual intervention for exception handling. The new workflow fosters greater degrees of quality control and efficiency, enhancing the productivity of staff and the overall data management process.

With Composer Workplace, records can be assigned to analysts or specialist teams according to user-definable parameters such as record characteristics or user location. Routing can also be defined based on validation rules, business rules or problems in data verification.

The data review process can incorporate levels of review that can, for example, allow for a quality assurance process to be incorporated into the data management workflow or for exception handling. This assignment and routing capability enables clients to incorporate their own specific quality assurance and exception handling processes into the data management workflow.

In addition, clients may leverage "out of the box" workflows that reflect Cicada's extensive practical experience in data management workflow requirements. The company will also customize workflows for specific client requirements.

Another significant benefit is that Composer Workplace has been designed to minimize development involvement. It allows business analysts to define and maintain participants, workflow routing requirements and associated business rules.

The workflow is fully integrated with Composer, Cicada's reference data management platform, which provides for advanced source management, data validation rules management and the creation of derived and calculated data, as well as flexible data distribution.

"Given the data management demands on institutions today in light of the regulatory environment and the volume of information to deal with, we continually work to ease the burden on institutions and their staff by giving them a greater degree of control and efficiency," said Hubert Holmes, Cicada Executive Vice President. "This new workflow capability is a major tangible result of executing our reference data product strategy in both our licensed software business and our outsourcing services."

The new release builds upon a recent series of enhancements to Cicada's reference data software, including the integration and launch of a new data validation rules engine and rules management graphical user interface in June 2004.