A new report from Aite Group, LLC provides an overview of research management platforms available to investment professionals. The report discusses three types of applications: research management systems, search-driven platforms and mashup platforms, which are appliance-based technologies that allow users to combine data from two or more sources to derive a mini-application.
Commercially available research management systems have only come into existence in this decade, and continue to grow more sophisticated to meet the differing needs of the asset management and hedge fund markets. The investment community is slowly absorbing that technology can in fact serve the research process – a process that is very much reliant upon cognitive and people skills.
Given the proliferation of data and information available in today’s marketplace, the speed at which that information is communicated and acted upon globally, and the general consensus that global capital markets will remain more volatile than in the past, investment staff must be efficient with their time in order to be effective with their decisions. Many investment firms are also finding that research systems can lay the groundwork for internal control and transparency as regulatory control increases. As such, the research management software market will reach US$148.3 million by 2012 from US$40.2 million today, a cumulative average annual growth rate of 39%.
“The latest iterations of research systems are intent on capitalizing on Internet-sourced information and mining retrieval data and information to create unique analytics,” says Denise Valentine, senior analyst with Aite Group and author of this report. “Investment staff members will face major challenges over the next few years as the global capital markets recover from the current market crisis. Grappling with the changes, the surge in data and information, and the speed with which events transpire, investment staff may well need to rethink their own efficiency. Many may find that when it comes to the heavy lifting of massive information volumes, machines are more efficient.”
The vendors in this report provide solutions that focus on the management, interpretation and effective use of research. While these solutions are not directly comparable to one another, the report presents a broad view of research management tools available to investment professionals. The vendors profiled in the report are Advent Software (acquired Tamale), Code Red , Connotate, Exession Group, First Coverage, FirstRain and JackBe.
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