FENICS Software Selects Versant ODBMS

Versant Corporation, a leading provider of middleware infrastructure technology, announced that FENICS Software Inc, the de facto standard application for foreign exchange (FX) options pricing and decision support the world over, has selected the Versant Object Database Management System (ODBMS). The Versant ODBMS will allow FENICS customers, the world's leading financial institutions, the ability to react to market needs faster.

FENICS is acknowledged to be the most sophisticated, powerful, and accurate software for FX options trading. It is used at over 800 sites in 50 countries, including more than 300 major banks-representing 90 per cent of the participants in primary markets. FENICS Software chose Versant's ODBMS solution in order to provide a more stable, powerful, and flexible product set to replace their former flatfile system. The new technology will increase speed of data access, improve security and resolve problems typically associated with traditional flatfile systems, including data conversion and elimination of corrupt or inconsistent files.

"The selection of Versant followed a comprehensive review of third party database systems," says FENICS Software Chief Executive John Ashworth. "We chose Versant because the ODBMS technology was the most effective and elegant solution available. It has an extremely friendly development environment resulting in development timeframes that now take only months where formerly it would have taken years."

"The selection of our ODBMS by FENICS demonstrates the power of our solution for highly distributed, complex data applications," said Adrian Jones, Versant European vice president. "Versant has established itself as the infrastructure vendor of choice for the global financial services marketplace, providing scalable and high performance solutions for mission critical applications such as fraud detection, risk management and portfolio management."

FENICS felt that a key factor in its decision was that the Versant ODBMS requires no ongoing maintenance by a database administrator, which meant that they could install the solution and let it run without intervention. "We were also impressed with the level of Versant's support commitment," said Ashworth. "Essentially, Versant has enabled us to streamline our existing product set, resolving potential problems associated with the former flatfile solution, such as corrupt and inconsistent files, slow data access, security and data conversion loads. Ashworth concluded, "The bottom line is that Versant allowed us to overcome all of the limitations we had previously experienced with the flatfile system. We can add functionality to the core product faster and still offer our customers a more stable environment."

Versant Corporation

Since the company's founding in 1988, Versant Corporation has led the industry in providing highly scalable and reliable object management solutions for complex, enterprise-level systems. Customers in the telecommunications, financial services, transportation, and defense industries have depended on Versant ODBMS for large-scale applications such as yield management, fraud detection, real-time data collection and analysis, and operation support systems (OSS). Today, Versant has taken that technology and applied it to another large-scale solution, helping customers build their e-business and Internet infrastructure where scalability, performance and fast time-to-market are critical success factors. Additional information about Versant and its products may be obtained by phone at 510-789-1500 or at www.versant.com.

FENICS Software Inc

FENICS Software is the market standard for foreign exchange options pricing and decision support. FENICS is used at over 800 sites in 50 countries worldwide, which represents the vast majority of primary market participants. FENICS is a full front-to-middle office solution for pricing, analyzing and managing foreign exchange OTC and exchange-traded portfolios of vanilla and exotic options, and is connected with all major back and middle office vendor solutions. FENICS Software has offices in New York, London, Singapore, Tokyo, and Tel Aviv. Information about FENICS can be found at www.fenics.com.

Contact Elizabeth Hoff of S&S PR for Versant PR, 1-800-287-2279, or 847-955-0700, elizabeth@sspr.com.