Today 5 years have passed since we have delivered the first version of UnRisk FACTORY to an Austrian bank. In fact UnRisk FACTORY has been created as result of a joint project ordered by a consortium of 3 banks with one common goal: enable them to perform portfolio-across-scenario-analytics in-time and highly automated for portfolios that contain the most sophisticated deal types.
Begin of 2012 we have taken the 8th release of the UnRisk FACTORY to financial institutions. It completed a VaR universe atop the FACTORY and comes additionally as a special version for capital and risk managers - UnRisk FACTORY Capital Manager.
A fast growing base of capital management firms and funds enjoy its fast-time-to-insight, complete evidence and open information, in compliance with the rules of regulatory bodies but going far beyond. Its positioning at the value/cost map - UnRisk FACTORY CM starts at less than EUR 25K per year - and support of minimalist infrastructure makes the total cost of ownership unprecedented low.
But in many ways this is only the beginning. We are bursting with ideas that we cannot realize without rushing into insane growth. Consequently we decided to unleashing our programming power behind UnRisk.
Not so long ago, Marc Andreesen, inventor of Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, predicted: Software is Eating the World - referring to his own theory that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technology and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the industry.
Yes, more and more major businesses could not being run without software and online services. And this will grow, because development environments, and software tools as well as internet based services make it easy to do with a few people what required teams of 100s two decades ago.
No need to broadly repeat the transition of an online book sales pioneer into a software company, music and movie companies become software companies, marketing platforms, infotainment, edutainment and so on.
The fastest growing market participants in all type of industry sectors are software companies.
What about the tools and environments? Let me exemplarily name Wolfram|Alpha that's long term goal is to make all knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. It is a knowledge engine that analyses and transforms free-form input into powerful explanatory results.
In the May-12 issue of Wired Magazine I read The Rise of the Robot Reporter. The Author, Steven Levy, predicts that in 15 years 90% of news will be written by computers.
BTW, the same issue brought me to Andreesen, inspired by the article The Man Who Knows What's Next.
I started my career in the stone age of computing and my industrial socialization is marked from factory automation. At the beginning, we had comparatively lousy tools and environments. To create systems for offline programming and online manipulation of numerally controlled manufacturing equipment - machine tools, robots, guided vehicles, storage, .... - was not easy.
And I really had in mind that our software technology should be equivalent in complexity, power and importance to an operating system. And I still have.
First We Build The Tools - Then They Build Us, said Marshall McLuhan.
And I come back to our UnRisk FACTORY. It is a highly automated solution that produces important, structured information. It is made in our own domain specific development environment and by our own tools.
A blazingly fast valuation engine managed by programs formulated in a domain specific language, a data management environment and services hat ties things together and provide web front-end building.
Hybrid - the valuation and calibration engines in C++, financial programming in Mathematica constructs, data management in SQL, UnRisk services in Java, Java Server pages, ...
With the All-New UnRisk we make the engines platform-agnostic, supporting all new hybrid CPU/GPU architectures. The layer for domain specific, descriptive programming of engines and services will be multi-lingual: C++, Python, C#, Java ... Mathematica, MatLab, ... Services will include data base links and web-front-end building.
And it is amazing, it is equivalent in complexity, power and importance to a real cross-platform quant finance operating system. Empowering quant developers to transforming it into margins by their own clever systems driving their spiral of innovation. In consequence eating the quant finance world by a financial-institutions-into-software-companies business process. Or even stimulate do-it-yourself (DIY) finance?
If you want to exploit is, contact us now.
