OpenGamma financial analytics platform now open sourced

UK-based OpenGamma has been developing a unified platform for financial analytics which will allow financial services firms to combine their data management, calculation engines and analysis into a single framework. The platform, which is still in development, has now been released as a open source developer preview, dual-licensed under an Apache 2.0 licence or a commercial licence. The preview is described as a "beta-quality release" that has been through OpenGamma's testing and QA processes.

The 0.7.0 release includes the data management layer and live data subsystem, calculation engine, analytics library, time series management system and client libraries in Java and C#. This should be sufficient for bespoke applications to add support for "ad-hoc, near-real-time-streaming, batch/overnight and scenario/stress-test analytic calculations".

The developers stress that there are notable gaps in the functionality at this point. There are no pre-built data adapters for extracting data from sources such as Bloomberg or Thomson-Reuters; OpenGamma do have such adapters but are unable to distribute them except through their sales operation. Although some graphical user interface (GUI) components are included, the developers say none of them are "suitably hardened for end-user deployment" and exist to demonstrate the direction the developers are taking. Later releases will include a fully supported web-based user interface.

OpenGamma was founded in 2009 and raised $8.15 million from Accel Partners and FirstMark Capital to fund development. The company says that currently 70 per cent of employees work in research and development and its team has extensive experience in building front-office and risk analytics systems for many well known financial services providers. From the start, the company has planned on releasing the platform as open source as a key part of its strategy to allow widespread take-up of the technology.

The OpenGamma open source release sees the open source way reach into a business sector which, although it has seen open source used as a component in solutions, has not seen an entire platform offered in this way. OpenGamma hope to enable in-house IT and developers at financial traders to be able to use the platform to improve the quality of data to their end users. The company is also developing a range of commercial ready-to-use applications, based on the platform, which can be up and running "out-of-the-box".

Developers interested in the OpenGamma platform will find the developers.opengamma.com web site has downloads, documentation, background information, release notes, a JIRA issue tracker, forums and links to the company's GitHub site.

(djwm)