OpenGamma Platform

It's not been a secret that we started OpenGamma, went deep into stealth mode, and have been hiring. There's also been a fair amount of speculation about what precisely we're doing. When we went into stealth mode, it was to give us some breathing ... [More] space, and room to make sure that when we did publicly reveal what OpenGamma was doing, we were able to describe the full nature of our vision, and were able to take on customers who wanted to take advantage of that vision. I'm glad to say that we're now ready to come out of stealth mode and share the story with the world. The Origins of OpenGamma The central idea of OpenGamma, that analytics computation is naturally a shared service between end-user applications and so should be based on a common set of infrastructure, started out of a real need that the three founders have felt in working directly in risk and front office technology for financial services firms. I remember sitting at 3am in my hotel room in New York on a project kickoff meeting for a new set of analytics calculation infrastructure for my employer, emailing the other two co-founders that I knew that what I was setting out to build shouldn't be built in the confines of one firm at all. What I was tasked with building was generic infrastructure, but infrastructure for which there wasn't a viable commercial offering. And even if there was a vendor making a suitable analytics infrastructure product, we had been burned as a company by all the closed, inflexible vendor systems in our architecture that we wouldn't trust anything unless we could freely access the source code before purchase. That need, for generic infrastructure that was open in every sense of the world, and that we could use to build both front office trading systems and complex risk management systems, formed the initial ideas behind OpenGamma. After the credit crunch, Jim, Elaine and I set out to turn our vision of a single unified platform for analytics across financial services firms into reality. We met with a number of different people, in technology and on the trading and risk desks, on the front line and in senior management, to talk about their experiences with analytics technology in financial services firms. We worked hard to determine the precise nature of what we thought was necessary to provide to the market to make sure that we were building something that technologists would love to deploy, end-users would love to use, and procurement departments would love to sign contracts for. Our Series A Funding When we had gotten to the point where we had people willing to go on record saying "Yes, if they build what they say they'll build, and they have the business model they say they will, we'd buy it" we realized it was time to start building it. While I'm generically in favor of bootstrapped business models for most startups these days, we knew that we were building something far too large to be done in a bootstrapped fashion. The sheer scope of what we needed to present as a minimum viable product meant that we needed external capital to get started. When I moved to the UK I had met with Bruce Golden and Kevin Comolli of Accel Partners and I knew that they would be perfect partners in building OpenGamma. Accel believed in our vision, and we raised a Series A round of funding from Accel Partners, and we're pleased to have Bruce on our Board. Where we go from here We've built out the core of our flagship technology, the OpenGamma Platform. In building it, we've taken all the lessons that the combined team has learned at a variety of hedge funds, investment banks, and broker-dealers, as well as from pure technology firms outside of financial services. We've also taken everything that we've heard from customers, in technology and in trading and risk management, to build a feature-set that we believe is second-to-none in terms of end-user productivity and power. Our goal in building OpenGamma isn't just to build an open source technology. Our goal is to build the best platform for financial analytics and risk management possible. We'll be releasing it under an Open Source license because that's what customers have told us they want. They want to be able to debug all their integration points; they want to be able to step through the code; they want to know exactly what's changed in each release to an individual file level; they want to have confidence in the quality of what's under the hood; they want to be able to download and play with the code without a sales person getting involved; they want the confidence that there will be an ecosystem that develops around the core platform that adds to the value of the technology beyond what a single vendor can produce. The time's come for us to share it with the world, in a controlled release form. While we will be releasing the entire core platform under a commercially-friendly Open Source license, we want to make sure that the first release is something that you can feel confident putting into production. That's where our Early Adopter Program comes in. The final feature set and hardening will be done under the auspices of our EAP, and when we come out with the source code itself, you'll have the confidence to know that it's not a 0.1 or even 1.0 version, it's been hardened and tested in production by several firms. You'll know it's ready to be used in anger. We'll be sharing more of the stories of building the platform, and many of the technical features, here on this blog. But if you're interested in seeing a demo, hearing more, and possibly joining our EAP, contact us. We'd love to talk to you. [Less]