03/08/2005

GemStone Systems, a data services infrastructure software company, today announced that Bear Stearns (NYSE: BSC), a leading global investment banking, securities trading and brokerage firm, has selected GemFire Enterprise for managing in-memory data across its enterprise applications. GemFire is now a strategic component of the Bear Stearns non-stop enterprise architecture that seeks to help Bear Stearns achieve a multi-fold increase in trading speeds and volumes, reduce risk computation times, and also have a better picture of risk, pricing and portfolio valuations across multiple asset categories.

In the initial phase, GemFire will be deployed as a part of the Program Trading as well as the Global Clearing and Settlement Risk Analytics architectures at Bear Stearns.

By deploying , GemStone said that Bear Stearns can improve the management of data in multiple formats across several operating environments while further reducing data latency and data bottlenecks. GemStone said Bear Stearns chose GemFire Enterprise after a formal evaluation process that included the consideration of proprietary distributed caching and data management products as well as open standards-based offerings. GemFire’s stability and ability to outperform competitive products made it a compelling choice for Bear Stearns, GemStone said.

“We were looking for data management technology that would complement our architecture strategy on two fronts,” said Peter Cherasia, chief information officer of Bear Stearns. “First, we needed high performance, scalability, and aggregate reliability to match our trading and risk computing cluster. Second, we wanted to efficiently leverage our investment in high performance object-oriented software. The GemFire product exceeded our performance requirements and enabled us to integrate applications without single points of failure or burdensome data transformation.”

“GemFire becomes a key component of Bear Stearn’s risk infrastructure as their underlying data fabric for risk management. GemStone’s goal is to help Bear Stearns significantly improve operational efficiencies, customer service and profitability,” said Richard Lamb, president at GemStone Systems. “With GemFire, Bear Stearns can efficiently manage significantly large volumes of data, which need to be manipulated to run risk calculations regardless of the location of the application. This provides increased scalability and business continuity through effective load-balancing of data resources.”