April 14, 2014 - Volante Technologies, a global leader in the provision of innovative financial data integration, today announced that it has enhanced Volante Designer version 5.0 to support the Hadoop® framework.

Integrating Hadoop® functionality into ‘Designer’ enables Volante clients to set up analytic conditions and feed data sets directly into a high-end analytical Hadoop® environment of their choice.  Users can start the design, development and testing of a 'Big Data' analytical solution without having to pre-install a Hadoop® engine or hire technical experts.  This makes it easier to set up and analyze previously inaccessible large hybrid data sets stored in data warehouses, in a short timeframe with little upfront investment.

Using Volante and Hadoop®, complex financial transaction data can now be blended with unstructured data sets (e.g., from website browsing, shopping carts, social media sites, images, etc.) to uncover new business intelligence. This can lead to greater understanding of customer behavior, underpinning the development process for new product and service offerings.

Kevin McPartland, Greenwich Associates, said, ”The last few years has brought with them a data explosion for financial services firms. While this new data can provide much needed transparency for an industry focused on risk management and finding the best price, consuming and processing this information from dozens of disparate sources is easier said then done. As regulatory reporting burdens have grown and required data sets become larger, tools to normalize and make sense of this ever increasing flood of data will only become more important."

Vijay Oddiraju, CEO, Volante Technologies, Inc, said, “It is our mission to take the complexity out of the adoption of emerging technology, evolving messaging standards, and changing protocols. Helping our clients access the power of Hadoop in a cost-effective way fits that mission.”

“The explosion of unstructured data sets offers greater potential consumer and marketplace insights, and our clients need tools to help set up, process and analyze the data they collect,” added Oddiraju. “The additional complexity of working with tools like Hadoop® presented a barrier to entry; we eliminate that barrier by integrating Hadoop tools right into our pc-based Designer product.”

Using Volante Designer, financial institutions and large corporates can normalize and merge the colossal amounts of transaction data they own in disparate financial data standard structures into the Volante-enabled Hadoop® environment.  This allows the analysis of different types of business flows including payments, trade finance, securities transactions and data scattered between core systems, counterparties and clearing agents, delivering added insight into the risk elements of the business.

• Volante Designer removes the complex ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) coding requirements associated with data extrapolation and population of the typical Hadoop® platform.
• All data flows are supported in a Hadoop® system which acts as reader, mapper, reducer and writer.  This ensures that data stream integrity is maintained as they pass up and down the MapReduce processing chain.
• Volante’s data enhancement capabilities include financial data parsing, mapping and serializing and Hadoop® integration is also supplied with Apache PIG, a secondary programming language used for expressing data analysis programs.
• A Hadoop® simulator is embedded within version 5.0 to test MapReduce applications on Microsoft Windows without having to install Hadoop® on the desktop.  This greatly eases the testing burden of any Hadoop®-based solution prior to deployment.