All too often, organizations attempt to manage their risk or analytics batch jobs using traditional batch/job management systems or native operating system utilities. These, however, neither have the functionality nor flexibility to meet the needs of today's financial services companies. This often necessitates the creation of in-house infrastructure code which is responsible for shielding the complexities of risk from the batch-management and execution platform. This infrastructure code is very common across firms and is even sometimes repeated in several guises within a large firm--especially as IT teams tend to be aligned to particular business divisions and geographical locations.

Obix Batch Control is an analytics batch control and execution environment which has been designed from the ground up to cater for high-volume transaction financial environments. It not only caters for the management (definition, administration) of jobs, but also provides an inbuilt distributed processing mechanism for dispatching jobs for execution.

It is based on an open architecture and code base, thus ensuring that organizations retain key control over the implementation of their risk and analytics infrastructure. It can simply be bolted on to an existing code base without fear of vendor or technology lock-in. It simply removes the need for analytics developers to constantly repeat unnecessary boiler-plate functionality when designing risk or analytics engines.

Amongst the challenges of managing risk or analytics jobs is that even in an institution of relatively modest size, they can easily number in the thousands when viewed across counterparties, portfolios, books, trades, or trade-legs. Consequently, jobs not only have to be distributed across processors in order to ensure completion in a reasonable time-frame. It is also necessary that all stakeholders have a real-time and up-to-date view of the state of the batch at any given time. Furthermore, it should be possible to delegate management (stops, hold, re-run) of jobs, where necessary, so as to reduce administrative overhead.

In summary, the product aims to offer the following benefits.

• Advanced visualisation: Jobs can be organised according to books, counterparties, users, trades or other user defined custom tag.
• Security and Authorisation: Inbuilt security and authorisation features. This includes audit logging to ensure that all changes to system state are traceable.
• User self-service: Increase productivity by delegating administration and job management.Increase productivity by delegating administration and job management.
• Distributed processing model: This ensures that jobs can be split across processors or machines in order to reduce total batch running time.
• Inbuilt redundancy and automated failover.