Sequent Customer NASD Regulation Wins Leadership Award from The Data Warehouse Institute with Fraud Detection System
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Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. has announced that its customer, NASD Regulation, Inc., has won The Data Warehouse Institute's (TDWI) highest distinction, the 1998 Leadership in Data Warehousing Award, for successfully implementing one of the world's most sophisticated surveillance systems. The NASD Regulation/Sequent solution was recognized as the best data warehousing implementation among the 12 Best Practice Award winners, named by TDWI earlier this year.

Running on Sequent's NUMA-Q 2000 server, NASD Regulation's Advanced Detection System (ADS) is a market surveillance, data mining, and fraud/violative behavior detection application that monitors The Nasdaq Stock Market (and other markets regulated by NASD Regulation) for potential late trade reporting, market integrity, and best execution violations. Since its implementation in July 1997, ADS has provided NASD Regulation with more comprehensive and better quality information and review of the market surveillance data captured by the system.

NASD Regulation oversees all U.S. stockbrokers and brokerage firms. NASD Regulation, along with The Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc., are subsidiaries of the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc. (NASD), the largest securities-industry self-regulatory organization in the United States.

The ADS application combines data visualization, time sequence pattern matching, rule pattern matching, and data mining in a single application on Sequent's data warehouse platform, allowing it to monitor for patterns or practices of potentially violative behavior, thereby helping to ensure marketplace integrity.

"Bringing ADS on-line gives NASD Regulation another powerful set of tools to help protect investors and ensure marketplace integrity," said Jim Cangiano, NASD Regulation's Senior Vice President of Market Regulation." NASD Regulation continues to put technology to work to detect and deter fraud and other improper market activities." The Data Warehouse Institute recognized ADS for successfully improving the integrity and fairness of the marketplace, as evidenced by the improved surveillance and market regulation.

In 1996, NASD Regulation began evaluating systems solutions from various vendors to implement ADS for break detection. Oracle's Oracle7 was initially selected as the information management software for the data warehouse-centric application (the software was eventually upgraded to Oracle's Oracle8.0.3), as it can easily scale to handle information from the approximately 900,000 trades and 1.5 million quote updates made each day.

Looking for a highly-parallel, very large data warehouse server, NASD Regulation selected Sequent's industry-leading NUMA-Q 2000 server with three four-processor Intel-based quads for its performance, capacity, scalability and Oracle compatibility. NASD Regulation also chose SRA International to develop algorithms and software components for ADS. Portions of this software are now part of SRA's Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) Explorer, which performs data mining. This software was developed and optimized on Sequent's scalable platforms to exploit the highly-parallel nature of the NUMA-Q architecture.

The NUMA-Q/KDD Explorer detection system proved flexible enough to identify multiple types of potential violations among diverse user groups across NASD Regulation's distinct business practices. "With Sequent's solutions, our customers can leverage their data warehouse to identify and ultimately weed out questionable transactions -- resulting in higher integrity for transaction regulation, lower costs and maximized profitability," said James FitzGerald, worldwide marketing manager of Decision Advantage for Sequent.

"NASD Regulation took full advantage of this solution to successfully manage potential trading violations in a truly mission-critical environment -- the Nasdaq market. We are pleased to have The Data Warehouse Institute recognize NASD Regulation for this accomplishment."

Sequent's NUMA-Q 2000 and SRA's KDD Explorer are now offered as Decision Advantage for Fraud Detection, Sequent's solution consisting of hardware, software and services. This end-to-end solution for real-time fraud detection is designed for rapid deployment in a range of environments, including government, retail, healthcare, telecommunications and financial services.

NASD Regulation is the third Sequent customer to win TDWI's prestigious Best Practices Award. Last year Sequent customer Eckerd Corporation, one of America's largest drug chains, won the award based on its warehouse for sales, gross margin and inventory/pipeline analysis. In 1996, Sequent customer R+V Versicherung, one of the largest insurance companies in Germany, won the award for its profit/loss analysis system.

Sequent Computer Systems, a leader in Intel-based systems for the data center, is committed to the success of its end-user and system integrator customers. Sequent's platform architectures and services are optimized for the scalability, availability and manageability requirements of corporate and institutional data center environments leveraging industry-standard technologies and best-in-class partnerships.

Sequent was one of the world's fastest-growing server vendors with systems priced between $100K and $1M in 1997 on the strength of NUMA-Q 2000, and has been the number one vendor of high-end UNIX servers in the UK for the past seven years, according to IDC. Sequent supports more than 10,000 installations worldwide, including many of the world's largest and most sophisticated OLTP, DSS and RDBMS applications.