Percona, the company that delivers enterprise-class MySQL®, MongoDB® and other open source database solutions and services, announced the success of Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe 2017, which took place September 25-27, 2017 at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel in Dublin, Ireland.

The Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe is the premier event for individuals and businesses developing and using open source software. The conference theme this year was "Championing Open Source Databases," and the event included more than 100 speakers sharing their in-depth knowledge with more than 350 attendees.

"This year's Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe demonstrated how open source database solutions are powering digital transformation and enabling organizations of all sizes and across all industries to innovate and grow rapidly," said Peter Zaitsev, co-founder and CEO of Percona. "Once again, I want to thank all our champions of open source databases - our sponsors, speakers and attendees - for taking time to share their knowledge and insights to create an inspiring environment of learning and community."

Keynote Addresses and Breakout Sessions
This year's Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe featured 11 keynote addresses (available on YouTube) and more than 100 informative tutorials and breakout sessions, including:

• Championing Open Source Databases - Peter Zaitsev, Percona
• MySQL as a Layered Service: How to Use ProxySQL to Control Traffic and Scale Out - Rene Cannao, ProxySQL
• Real Time DNS Analytics at Cloudflare with ClickHouse - Tom Arnfeld, Cloudflare
• Why Open Sourcing Our Database Tooling Was the Smart Decision - Shlomi Noach, GitHub
• MyRocks at Facebook and a Roadmap - Yoshinori Matsunobu, Facebook
• Prometheus for Monitoring Metrics - Brian Brazil, Prometheus/Robust Perception
• State of the Dolphin - Geir Høydalsvik, Oracle
• Many Faces of Continuent Tungsten - MC Brown, Continuent
• Database Performance in High Traffic Environments - Pavel Genov, Pepper
• MySQL 8.0: Atomic DDLs - Implementation and Impact - Ståle Deraas, Oracle
• RocksDB Static Sorted Table (SST) Formats: Considerations When Building a Search Engine - Tarek Sheasha, Booking.com
• High Performance JSON - PostgreSQL vs. MongoDB - Wei Shan Ang and Dominic Dwyer, GlobalSign
• Automating and Managing MongoDB: An Analysis of Ops Manager vs. ClusterControl - Ruairí Newman, Severalnines AB
• Building Multi-Petabyte Data Warehouses with ClickHouse - Alexander Zaitsev, LifeStreet/Altinity
• Scaling and Hardware Provisioning for Databases: Lessons Learned at Wikipedia - Jaime Crespo, Wikimedia Foundation

Sponsorships
Percona Live Open Source Database Conference Europe 2017 was made possible through the support of the following sponsors:

• Diamond Sponsor - Continuent
• Gold Sponsors - Facebook, VividCortex
• Exhibitor Sponsors - Altinity, Ispirer, PGDAY Russia '17, Rackspace, Severalnines, TimescaleDB
• Contributor Sponsors - Webyog, Oracle MySQL
• Media Sponsors - CMSWire, Datanami, InsideBigData, InsideHPC, ODBMS.org, Opensource.com, O'Reilly Media

The Next Percona Live Conference

What: Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018 
Where: Santa Clara, Calif. 
When: April 23-25, 2018

The call for papers for Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2018 will be opened soon, look to the conference landing page for news and updates.

Evli Fund Management company has renewed the name and strategy of its Alfa bond fund to Evli Nordic Corporate Bond. The fund focuses on Nordic rated investment grade and high yield bonds and unrated corporate bonds. 

The background research shows that the Nordic corporate bond market is already a sizable market of a value of EUR 150 billion and is growing. The unique combination of strong fundamentals and attractive valuation is luring more and more non-Nordic investors. However, most European investors still invest only in officially rated corporate bonds in these markets, although the track record shows that Nordic smaller unrated companies typically yield more than similar credit risk profiles. These smaller unrated companies represent over 70 percent of the Nordic issuers. 

"The Nordic bond market offers a vast variety of sectors, local mix and structure. With the Nordic Corporate Bond fund, we can focus on the potential both the rated and unrated Nordic companies offer. In addition, Evli is in a prime position to offer investors diversification and additional return potential to their bond portfolio. We have close to 20 years of investment experience in Nordic corporate bonds and an expert team of portfolio managers analyzing and buying Nordic credit" Kim Pessala, managing director of Evli Fund Management Company, comments.

The objective of the Nordic Corporate Bond fund is to offer an actively managed fund with high, stable return and European off-index corporate bond investments from quality issuers to investors interested in the Nordic market. The fund consists of 100 percent corporate bonds from Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

QuantHouse, the independent global provider of end-to-end high performance market data and trading through API based technologies, today announced the availability of QuantFEED and QuantLINK to Virtu Financial’s disclosed Systematic Internaliser platform enabling clients to access Virtu’s liquidity under MiFID II’s transparent SI regime.

Virtu Financial is one of the largest electronic market makers, providing liquidity to the global equity, ETF, Energy, and FX markets and is raising the bar on transparency by providing bilateral liquidity in European cash equities to sell side firms in Europe by utilizing MiFID II’s SI regime. Virtu Financial Ireland Limited intends to register as a Systematic Internaliser (SI) in Europe in 2018. 

For many years QuantHouse has been successful in delivering normalized market data as well as Direct Market Access for more than 150 venues across the globe through a single API.

Christiaan Scholtes, Head of Markets in Europe, Virtu Financial, said, “QuantHouse’s decision to develop a QuantFEED and QuantLINK offering access to the Virtu SI is an important step allowing us to provide our firm quotes efficiently and transparently to a broader range of market participants.”

Stephane Leroy, Business Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, QuantHouse, said, “As the liquidity landscape in Europe undergoes a fundamental shift, we are here to help clients look for ways to rapidly adapt. Our partnership with Virtu is another example of QuantHouse’s innovation capabilities to help clients drive their business forward.”

ERI is pleased to announce that Warwyck Private Bank ltd, headquartered in Phoenix, Mauritius, has chosen the Olympic Banking System for the development of its private banking business.

Axioma, a leading provider of enterprise market risk analytics and portfolio construction solutions, has released the latest version of its suite of Worldwide Equity Risk Models™ (“WW4”), which consists of short- and medium-horizon fundamental and statistical models. 

NRI, a leading global provider of system solutions and consulting service, and Microsoft Japan, today announced a joint decision between the two companies to establish the Financial Digital Innovation Consortium. The Consortium will be officially established on November 1, 2017, and will initially be composed of 18 organizations that will conduct proof of concept (PoC) studies on key trends in financial technology.

The Consortium’s focus will include hot topics such as the financial cloud, advanced data utilization, and the applications of new technologies. Working groups will conduct PoCs on:

 Financial Cloud application: Aims to standardize flexible and convenient cloud infrastructure with initiatives such as complying with FISC guidelines which is planned to be updated in March, 2018.

Advanced data utilization: Supports financial institutions’ digital transformation by increasing productivity, supporting sales activities, establishing sound relationship with customers and complying with regulations.

New technologies related to FinTech: Explores the possibilities of next-generation financial platforms by applying new technologies such as AI, deep learning and blockchain.

In addition, the consortium aims to improve financial institutions’ operation and expand their operation scope through the sharing of information. As a result, the consortium plans to increase financial institutions’ profitability by reducing workload, optimizing IT investments and shortening service release.

“NRI is very excited to be at the forefront of what we believe to be an extremely important gathering of the top organizations in Japanese financial services,” says Minoru Yokote, Senior Managing Director of NRI. “Through our work together, the consortium will be able to jumpstart innovation in Japanese financial services, driving companies to higher levels of efficiency and optimization through FinTech.”

NRI will drive the discussion among the consortium, utilizing the company’s accumulated knowledge through providing ICT service to financial institutions. Microsoft Japan will facilitate the consortium as an executive office while providing technological support including Microsoft Azure, a public cloud platform the consortium will use at the core of its operations.

Appian, a leading Low-Code and Business Process Management platform provider, announced today the latest version of the Appian platform with patent pending intelligent and automatic parallelization for multi-core processing. This extends Appian's market leading Low-Code design experience, allowing Appian customers to capture complex rule and interface logic in a visual and intuitive design experience that does not require learning complex coding. Appian now stands as the only leading Low-Code Platform to offer automatic parallelization, with competing Low-Code vendors still requiring customers to develop in 3GL programming languages to take advantage of parallel computing.

Appian's latest innovation removes all complexity with programming for parallel computing - a computer science programming technique allowing a computation with many calculations to be carried out simultaneously. The upgrades  intelligently analyze the design of a customer's software application built in Appian and automatically optimizes the code for parallelization across multiple CPU cores. Traditionally, developers must manually write code in 3GL development tools to take advantage of multi-core CPUs. Furthermore, as the number of CPU cores increases over time, from 4 to 16 and now 32 cores or more, writing code that takes maximum advantage of these cores becomes increasingly challenging.

Enterprises today increasingly require parallel computing to deliver the performance required for their complex business applications. Scenarios within Appian Records that retrieve data from multiple data sources in a single view can now be executed in parallel leading to large application performance gains. Preliminary testing by Appian has shown application performance has increased by as much as 300% in applications with multiple I/O operations. 

"Automatic parallelization of a sequential program has long been considered the holy grail of parallel computing in computer science," said Michael Beckley, Chief Technology Officer with Appian. "Appian has achieved this through our patented SAIL engine by implementing intelligent analysis of a customer's algorithms.  Through this, we can avoid common issues with parallel computing, such as race conditions, while also optimizing the execution of the sequential logic in parallel."

In addition, this release introduces a number of key features that accelerate a customer's time to solution as well as deliver compelling web and mobile user experiences. This includes:

• Improved charting in reports and linking controls
• Fast export to Microsoft Excel from Appian Reports
• Support for the latest iPhone 8 / 8 Plus and iPhone X running iOS 11 and Android 8 mobile devices
• Simplified integration design for connecting to common systems
• Accelerated interface design for building rich user experiences

Beckley continued, "Appian has always believed in delivering a low-code platform that allows our customers to deliver powerful business applications with ease. Our customers have already seen a 10x to 20x increase in the speed to deliver new digital solutions, and now with automatic parallelization, their applications are on par with the most sophisticated solutions custom built in traditional programming languages."

The latest release of the Appian platform will be available to Appian customers and partners on November 17th, 2017. Appian will also be featuring this release with automatic parallelization at the upcoming developer conferences in Las Vegas, Nevada including Amazon AWS Re:Invent on November 27th to December 1st and Gartner Application Strategies & Solutions Summit on December 4th to December 6th.

Creative software, data & analytics companies are sharpening established practices and challenging legacy systems in the insurance sector, as significant inroads are being made into the giant insurance market. This innovation trend is driven by growing consumer power, rising cost pressures leading to a search for efficiencies, mounting regulatory burdens, and a large pool of venture capital.

Already the growing sector has seen 240 M&A transactions since 2011, with volumes increasing in number by more than 10% annually. Disclosed values for 105 of these deals total $37.4 billion in aggregate, with 36 each worth more than $100 million. The vast majority of deals are in North America or Europe, and involve companies with software-centric business models. Private-equity backed platforms and strategic investors shared the market roughly 40/60 by both volume and quantum. 

According to QM Indices, insurance software, data & analytics investments have outperformed the FTSE 100 by significant margins since 2011, creating a powerful opportunity for investors:

• Insurance software outperformed the FTSE 100 by 112.3% 
• Insurance information, data, and analytics outperformed by 52.4% 
• Insurance tech-enabled services outperformed by 33.0%

Quayle Munro expects M&A velocity in insurance software, data & analytics to accelerate, and premium valuations to be offered for companies providing proprietary datasets and sophisticated tools.

Andrew Adams, CEO at Quayle Munro comments:

“Leading incumbents have been highly acquisitive as they seek to consolidate their market positions. Insurers are increasingly seeing that their solutions could enable significant operational improvements across the entire insurance value chain, to the benefit of all. Companies with the best potential are attracting the attention of consolidators.

“Significant investment from traditional insurers, via newly-established venture arms, is a clue to the disruption on the horizon. As increasing volumes of capital are put to work and more insurers become receptive to new technologies, we expect to see the insurance software, data & analytics and tech-enabled services M&A market go from strength to strength.”