Bloomberg LP Moves Into EDM Market, Acquires PolarLake

That's the second acquisition in the product vendor market in the last few weeks - CADIS has been baucht by Markit just recently. I wonder if there is a strategic advantage for the bigger players adding a reference data system to the product portfolio and even more so: why this is happening just now.

Report on Order Management Systems

This report by CAPIS (Capital Institutional Services), done in 2007, shows a nice overview of funtionalities of Order Management Systems, as well as an overview of them with a detail fact sheet per system.

The report covers systems that have a rather big footprint in the USA and is far from being complete, but the information listed per system is superb although more or less taken from the vendors fact sheets (for most of the given information).

The functionalities being expected in an order management system (from CAPIS' point of view):

• Portfolio Management (normally not an integral part of an OMS but a system group of its own)
  
• Compliance
• Trading
• Fix (considered to be a separate functionality group, in my opinion a general order routing functionality)
• Allocation
  

Systems listed are:

• Advent - Moxy
• SS&C - Antares
• Bloomberg - POMS
• Charles River - CRIMS
• Eze Castle
• Fidessa - LatentZero
• INDATA
• LineData - LongView
• MacGregor - XIP
• Sungard - Asset Arena (formerly known as Decalog)