Eikos Partners is a strategic IT consulting firm whose partners, Michael DeSanti, Brian Slater and David Lattimore-Gay, have held significant roles in large financial firms as well as in the consulting industry. With a focus on the financial industry, and in particular on capital markets, the firm seeks to help firms improve the return on their IT investments and strengthen the link between business needs and IT. We spoke with David Lattimore-Gay about some of the work that Eikos Partners has done with hedge fund clients, and his observations on how Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) has helped improve the speed with which hedge funds can shift and modify data views in order to maintain a “proprietary edge” in the marketplace.

“Hedge funds have a significantly different profile from investment banks – they must keep pace with a rapidly changing market and don’t have the luxury of spending years building enterprise-wide infrastructures,” Lattimore-Gay says about the fast-paced world of hedge funds.

To get out of the gate quickly, these firms often rely on the Microsoft Office suite, with Excel, Access and Word prevalent for most day-to-day functions and Microsoft technologies, such as SQL Server, popular for their easy integration with the Office suite of products so widely in use.

But there is another Microsoft technology that has increasingly been delivering ease, flexibility and agility to hedge funds as they continually seek to sharpen and fine-tune their views of the market, and that is Windows Presentation Foundation or WPF.

“You have credit analysts, portfolio managers, traders, and operations guys who have traditionally had their own applications they use to get work done,” Lattimore-Gay explains. “To gain a cutting edge or proprietary edge in the marketplace, each of these different groups have increasingly been talking to each other and leveraging each other’s data.”

Eikos Partners has worked with several firms in the construction of portals of sorts, that allow data from these varied applications to be accessed and integrated more readily by varied groups of users on the front end. Where WPF comes in, is that it provides more of a decoupling between the business functionality and the user interface than other alternatives. As a result, once Eikos Partners creates a portal structure to make data from varied applications widely available to the front end, a designer can easily access that data, and create charts, graphs and new views for displaying and drilling down into that information very quickly.

“To gain a cutting edge or proprietary edge in the marketplace, each of these different groups have increasingly been talking to each other and leveraging each other’s data.” — Lattimore-Gay

“You could argue that you can do that with ASP.NET and AJAX but those technologies tend to have more of a bleed-over between designer and developer,” he says. “WPF has a very logical but physical break with the business functionality that allows the UI designer to provide tools very rapidly. It makes it easier to quickly visualize data in many different ways.”

Whereas once upon a time firms were reporting consolidated statement information once a quarter or monthly, now monthly information is viewed as one month out-of-date, Lattimore-Gay notes. By leveraging portal type structures, firms are able to make that type of data available daily.

“The bottom line is that 99 percent of PCs on traders’ desks are either XP or Vista, so WPF leverages that fact for powerful applications that provide data quickly,” Lattimore-Gay says.

In another example, he explains, “If I am looking at a stress test scenario, the portal provides a set of data that WPF can interpret with line charts or bar charts, allowing users to drill down into the lowest level of detail.”

That speed and agility is giving firms an essential edge in competing in today’s hedge fund market.

“In today’s market users need to have data at their fingertips rather than having to dip into three different applications to access it,” Lattimore-Gay says.

www.eikospartners.com