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The Philadelphia Stock Exchange has started to replace its Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and Access databases, which create silos of data, with a centralized business intelligence infrastructure.

The Exchange has started a years-long effort to standardize on the Cognos 8 suite of tools for query, reporting and analysis of its back office systems that perform securities processing, trade clearing and billing, officials said this week.

The project also includes the rewriting of legacy mainframe applications in J2EE to run on IBM AIX-based systems, officials said.

The move to Cognos should allow the company to replace the islands of data in Excel and Access, which make it difficult for users to manipulate reports from the mainframe, with a centralized repository, said Doug Schafer, first vice president of derivatives trading system development at the stock exchange. Over time, the organization plans to consolidate all its BI activities into an enterprise data warehouse, which will allow for far easier data manipulation, Schafer said.

The Cognos BI system at the exchange will be rolled out in phases, Schafer said. The tools will eventually be available to 400 to 500 internal users and to external Wall Street firms to analyze their own trading data, Schafer added. "We wanted a tool that provides a Web-based interface for canned or ad hoc queries to allow these different type of users do more sophisticated filtering," he said.

The first phase of the project, which involved centralizing all the data related to the members of the Exchange, went live in November. This year, the exchange plans to begin using the BI tools to analyze consolidated real-time trading data and the securities processing information, he added.

While the project had some resistance at first -- with users reluctant to give up their spreadsheets and personal Access databases -- the organization was able to show users that the new system would make their jobs easier, Schafer said.

In addition, the exchange has been running the new BI system in parallel with the older methods so users "were able to gain confidence in the reporting they were seeing," he said.

"We can prove to them that they can save cycle and processing time," Schafer said.