AFTAs 2019: Best Global Deployment—Societe General
Josephine Gallagher, waters technology, Jan 20, 2020
Societe Generale wins the category for the best global deployment at the 2019 AFTAs, thanks to the rollout of its data services project (SDS), which leverages GigaSpaces’ distributed data platform, designed to support extreme-processing and real-time analytics. SDS ingests millions of data objects each day and provides a single source of truth for over 400 concurrent applications, including pre-trade, risk management and accounting services in multiple locations, including Paris, New York and Hong Kong. Data is replicated from one datacenter to the next across the locations, making it available to clients in milliseconds. The international rollout of the SDS project commenced in 2016, lasted over 20 months and replaced the bank’s existing data distribution system. The team comprised members from development and IT, and included an average of six to seven team members working full-time at various stages of the project. The platform was delivered using Agile techniques with development split between Paris and Bangalore. The GigaSpaces platform is built on an open-API architecture allowing clients to develop other applications on the platform and design their usage of data distribution services. A key focus for the project was to improve service delivery and resiliency, upgrading availability from 99% to 99.999% for the most critical business processes within Societe Generale. By leveraging GigaSpaces’ centralized distribution platform, Societe Generale was able to eliminate a number of platforms, develop a more simplified architecture and reduce its total cost of ownership (TCO).
GigaSpaces will continue to work with Societe Generale to reduce the number of its legacy platforms, further lowering its TCO and also helping it to optimize its use of data lakes. “There are many challenges with data lakes today,” says Karen Krivaa, vice president of marketing at GigaSpaces. “They are slow, they are not built for real-time ingestion or access, and real time is GigaSpaces’ forte. What we can do is help them accelerate or operationalize their data lakes.”