Sergey Ryazantsev: Nostradamus agrarian and industrial Complex is the powerful and available analytical platform for banks

Sergey Ryazantsev: The idea of creation of the solution for analytical tasks arose in the late nineties. Originally we wanted to make the solution for forecasting of currency rates and the analysis of banks of partners, from here and the name of a software package, Nostradamus paying a tribute to the famous predictor. First attempts at writing happened at the beginning of the 2000th, and the first really large-scale project began in 2003, in the large investment bank which is child structure of German bank. We work with this client to this day, tens of reporting and analytical projects are implemented.

Then ProgramBank delivered Nostradamusu agrarian and industrial Complex to some other large investment banking structures, including with participation of the state. It were the projects connected with integration of information flows from tens of separate sources, data scrubbing, formation of the different analytical reporting. By 2010 the pool of clients rather solid in terms of the scope of for whom the production center "Nostradamus" worked was created small by quantity, but. Nostradamus agrarian and industrial Complex remained widely known product, but in a narrow circle. The policy of the company at that time did not provide broad expansion and promotion of this product. At the same time constantly there was an improvement and practical application of new technologies and approaches.

Nevertheless, by the beginning of 2012 understanding came that promotion of Nostradamus agrarian and industrial Complex and solutions on its platform on the mass commercial market, including is necessary for small and medium banks. For what to the market solutions of high degree of readiness and low cost, boxed type were proposed.

TAdviser: What is HSC what technologies are the basis?

Sergey Ryazantsev: Nostradamus agrarian and industrial Complex includes the instrumental platform for design, creation, filling of data warehouses and development of application solutions, BI- tools and a set of business applications with the preconfigured data models. The platform is written on Delphi, for ensuring WEB FUNCTIONALITY technologies are used ASP.NET. Work with different DBMS, used for data management in Storage, but, first of all, it Oracle DBMS and MS SQL as some of the most widespread and powerful is supported.

TAdviser: How productive HSC what possible loadings, if it is possible on the example of specific projects is?

Sergey Ryazantsev: The basis of high performance is created first of all by the industrial DBMS used in solutions on the platform of Nostradamus agrarian and industrial Complex. The sufficiency of hardware resources and competent administration of databases has significant effect on performance. I will give digits for the solution on formation of the operational management reporting on transactions with financial instruments used in one of the largest investment banks of Russia as an example. Daily about 150 thousand records are loaded into base. For the end of the first quarter 2014 the total quantity of records in base made about 65 million. For work Oracle SE DBMS, 4th the nuclear processor and 6 GB of RAM is used. Time of creation of the most difficult report (with a large number of indicators on securities) is 3-5 minutes.

TAdviser: One of vital issues for platforms of data analysis is data scrubbing which directly affects operability of all solution. How does your agrarian and industrial complex work with this task?

Sergey Ryazantsev: In general concept data scrubbing rather wide. Nevertheless, in general everything can be reduced to there is nobody a set of approaches. But let's decide on what is "dirty" data. Best of all on the example of data on clients, as here more often than in booking data, there can be errors. It can be the admissions of letters, errors connected with incorrect use of the Latin keyboard, the wrong data types (letters instead of digits or on the contrary), etc. One more category of errors – duplication of data on clients. It is a situation rather widespread when information comes to storage from several systems.

At data scrubbing it is possible to select two stages: identification of errors and correction. Identification is performed automatically by check of data types and/or by means of comparison of data from different sources – reconciliation. Here, if in a large cage, and all. Correction is more intellectual process, mechanisms accurately and fuzzy retrieval and comparison, with determination of a "reference" source are used here. Also the problem of "gluing together" of data on clients or, in other words, the Uniform Client mechanism is implemented.

TAdviser: Thanks, this moment is clear. Whether functioning of other systems over HSC is possible: with what solutions the complex how interacts with them is usually integrated?

Sergey Ryazantsev: In general to build on something over Nostradamus, and rather over application solutions – the business applications implemented using tools of HSC do not make special sense. In principle, the superstructure can be considered office applications of the MS Excel and Word. Here we provide full compatibility and an opportunity how to unload reports in a format of office applications, and the simplified loading/insert options from Excel. It is necessary to be integrated, first of all, with accounting banking systems (core banking system) and also with the front office and back office systems. In Nostradamus there are universal, easily configured ETL mechanisms. They allow to load data as directly from databases, and from the files of a different format unloaded from external systems or created manually.

TAdviser: What modern technologies and tools are as a part of HSC: drill-down, data marts, data discovery? The interest of customers in such opportunities is how big?

Sergey Ryazantsev: Nostradamus agrarian and industrial Complex belongs more likely to the class of industrial BI platforms, than to the systems of the class data discovery. It is caused by need to solve the uncommon reporting and analytical problems requiring use of branched hierarchical objects, accomplishment enough difficult procedures over data, generation of secondary data, in particular, of postings, etc. All this does not allow to allow complete arbitrary behavior for users. Nevertheless, we incessantly work on expansion of opportunities of users regarding the choice of analytical cuts, formation of report forms and Dashboards.

For our customers who investment banking structures generally are it is important to trace communications between different elements of accounting, for example, between the transaction and wiring, or created given at the different levels of aggregation, for example, communication of the account balance and postings, this remaining balance. Therefore in solutions drill-through and drill-down mechanisms are demanded. Also the OLAP tools allowing users to create quickly analytical representations in different cuts enjoys popularity that happens it is necessary in the analysis of business, for determination of points of growth, the unprofitable directions and divisions, different detection of patterns.

TAdviser: And how you estimate uniqueness of Nostradamus agrarian and industrial Complex whether there are complexes, similar on functionality, in the Russian market?

Sergey Ryazantsev: At the Russian market there is a number of similar platforms, including the famous foreign producers. But if to speak about the banking market, then we compete, probably, only with two-three systems. Nostradamus agrarian and industrial Complex and solutions on its platform have a number of essential advantages.

First, tools. The company did not pursue fast result, it is a lot of and carefully worked on that work in the environment of Nostradamus agrarian and industrial Complex was, fast and did not require unique and expensive specialists. As I already mentioned, we hold a certain intermediate position between industrial BI-platforms in which hard coding, and the systems of the class data discovery prevails. As a result, and it is the second moment, low labor input, and, respectively, the cost of projects available even to medium business, simplicity and speed of the subsequent modification of solutions, availability to independent implementation and completion of solutions. Thirdly (it is not unique, but important aspect), existence of applied orientation to the financial sector, existence of solutions of boxed type and the data model created taking into account modern methodological approaches.

TAdviser: You mentioned ready-made boxed solutions based on HSC: to whom are they intended? In what their advantages?

Sergey Ryazantsev: Today we offer three business applications of boxed type. These business applications are focused, first of all, on the investment banking sector. "Nostradamus: Budgeting" – is intended for formation of budget model of the organization and ensuring processes of annual, mid-term and strategic planning. "Nostradamus: Administratively household expenses" – it is intended for planning and control of the corresponding expense category, including the organization of electronic document management. "Nostradamus: Managerial supervision" – it is intended for formation of a managerial data model of the organization, integration of information flows and transformation of data for the benefit of management accounting and control, formation different interactive (OLAP) and the static reports, diagrams and charts necessary for visualization and the analysis of management information in different cuts. Advantage of these business applications consists highly their readiness for implementation and the developed applied tools allowing to perform customization with the minimum labor costs.

TAdviser: What your plans for further development of a complex?

Sergey Ryazantsev: We move in several planes. On the one hand, we try to use the most modern basic software and additional components improving system performance. So at the beginning of a year we presented an exit, in fact a new product - Nostradamus 5.7. X, the analytical platform implemented on Delphi XE which is allowing to work with 64-bit applications, having the improved OLAP tools, enhanced capabilities on data loading, etc.

On the other hand, we develop tools of applied development, first of all, for fall forward and availability to setup, both applied developers, and end users. And, at last, we are going to offer the new business applications of boxed type providing the solution of analytical tasks in the field of bank risks.