On OEMS Integration, Fidessa Offers a Different Perspective

In a recent Waters feature, OMS and EMS: Peace Through Marriage, which traces the evolution of the integration between order management systems (OMS) and execution management systems (EMS), large numbers of vendors end-users feel that the closer those two tools can be woven, the easier their workflow becomes. Merely sticking a wire between them is not enough, they say. A single platform with a single interface is the ideal.

However, London-based Fidessa, which was not part of the original feature, has a slightly different take.

"Adding EMS functionality to an OMS often doesn't have the right robustness or real-time architecture or the ability to update quickly," explains Robin Strong, Fidessa's head of buy-side strategy. "Adding OMS functionality to an EMS often ends up adding an awful lot of historic data storage to a platform that's supposed to be light and nimble. The two don't tend to mix very well. I don't think many vendors have successfully deployed an OEMS on a single platform."

Credibility
The company has some credibility in this field ─ it was the first third-party technology vendor with a single, integrated offering. LatentZero was already well done the path of adding EMS functionality to its OMS platform shortly before it was acquired by Fidessa, which had its own EMS, in 2007. Indeed, Richard Jones, LatentZero's long-time CEO, spoke about the need to intregrate the two platforms as early as 2003, addressing the laborious "swivel-chair" challenge that a number of the firm's buy-side clients were experiencing.     

Fidessa decided to sell the two different products, with their different architectures, as a single tightly-integrated offering.

Because Fidessa keeps separate architectures, and hosts and manages them both, it can perform mass upgrades to either on its own, along with the requisite testing.

Part of the problem with a unified, rather than an integrated, tool, says the vendor, surrounds upgrades. The pace of change in the execution space is "staggeringly fast," requiring an EMS to be constantly updated. An OMS, by contrast, is relatively slow and clunky because it is the hub for so many other functions within a trading shop. OMS upgrades therefore happen less frequently. Because Fidessa keeps separate architectures, and hosts and manages them both, it can perform mass upgrades to either on its own, along with the requisite testing. For example, customers turned on their machines one morning last year to find Fidessa had added foreign-exchange trading capability overnight, according to Strong.

Irrelevant
"The underlying architecture is kind of irrelevant," Strong says. "For example, if you fire up Outlook, it's got built-in calendars and contacts and social media integration and so on. Do you think it's exactly a 100 percent unified architecture internally? Does Microsoft use all the same components to do that? Do you care? No ─ it just works."

The windows for the OMS and EMS can be positioned side-by-side and attuned to one another. So when a person executes an order for a particular name on the OMS window, the charts for that name automatically pop up in the EMS window.

In being first to market, Fidessa had to deal with challenges that its competitors didn't ─ the biggest was that it couldn't learn from anyone else's mistakes. Still, it felt it was right to make the first plunge. "The fact that we happened to combine all these things together in the right way and label it as an OEMS first was great ─ hey, we got a jump on the industry ─ but it was really only in response to what customers were asking us to do," says Strong.

Fidessa's next steps include enhanced fixed-income coverage and moving larger buy-side firms from using separate OMSs and EMSs onto its OEMS.