2004 marks Charles River's fourth consecutive year of double-digit revenue and net-income growth. Thirty-six new clients in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia-Pacific adopted Charles River IMS in 2004, and nine existing clients significantly expanded their contracts, bringing the client roster to 145 organizations in 30 countries. In total, Charles River clients manage over $10 trillion in assets.

"Due to the changing regulatory landscape and ongoing need for increased efficiencies, we continue to see an increasing number of hedge funds, asset managers, wealth managers and custodians who are looking for ways to automate, extend their STP, and increase compliance controls," said Peter Lambertus, president and CEO of Charles River Development. In addition to securing new client business, Charles River successfully completed 39 implementations in 2004, including 17 fixed income implementations, 30 equity, four in Asia-Pacific, four in Canada, and five in EMEA.

Also in 2004, Charles River continued the delivery of its open, distributed, service-based architecture with the release of version 7.2 of Charles River IMS and the beta-launch of version 8. These versions combine best-of-breed technologies such as Java, J2EE, Microsoft .NET, Messaging, and Web Services; the result is a comprehensive investment management platform that offers superior performance, a wide variety of deployment and integration options, unmatched flexibility and functionality, and maximum scalability regardless of long-term technology-trends.

"Charles River IMS version 8 marks the successful completion of three of four phases in our technology migration and the conversion of 75% of the product windows to our new C# / Microsoft .NET infrastructure. Nearly half of our client base has already upgraded, with the remaining planning to or in the process of upgrading," said Lambertus. "We are particularly pleased with the performance of our Java-based compliance engine, which performs up to ten times faster than competitive offerings, processing hundreds of trades or positions per second."

In addition to new technology, the firm introduced hundreds of functional enhancements in 2004, including: expanded capabilities for portfolio modeling, generic securities processing, tools for mortgage trading and TBA processing, four algorithmic broker interfaces, settlements routing and matching, FIX 4.4 execution and allocation support across all asset classes, single security swaps (asset, interest rate currency, total return and credit default), and FX workflows

Charles River also introduced several complementary services for Charles River IMS including global remote management, hosted solutions, and FIX network services.