October 2019 Company Newsletter

In this month’s newsletter, learn what our data says about the current “broker wars,” a tremendous Capital Group deal and more.

Note from the Communications Committee: We are looking for additional support in improving communication at Visible Alpha. This newsletter is a great step in the right direction, but there is more we can do with your help! Email [email protected] to learn how to get involved.

Metrics

For all financial metrics, check out the Finance Intranet page >

Five Largest Clients by Total ACV

• Point72 — $1,924,000 (9.68% of Total ACV)
• Millennium — $1,650,000 (8.30% of Total ACV)
• Balyasny — $696,450 (3.50% of Total ACV)
• Wellington — $482,400 (2.43% of Total ACV)
• T.Rowe Price — $401,500 (2.02% of Total ACV)

Key Client Wins in August

• Candlestick Capital — Insights, $156K ACV, 20 users
• Maverick Capital — Insights, $61.2K ACV, 6 users
• AllianceBernstein — Insights, $31.5K ACV, add-on of 4 users, now at a total of 24 users + Resource Tracking
• Alta Park — Insights + Resource Tracking + Broker Vote, $53.6K ACV, 4 users (Insights)
• Kuvari Partners — Insights, $36K ACV, 4 users
• Clearbridge Investments — Insights, $51K ACV, add-on of 5 users, now at a total of 8 users
• Conagra Brands — Corporate Insights, $20K ACV, 3 users

Key Contributor Additions in August

• Avior Capital — signed for models & consensus (existing research contributor)
• Davy — signed for consensus participation (previously model download & research only)
• Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken — signed for models, consensus & research

A full list of contributor statuses can be found on the Intranet in Contributor Relations >

Company Notes

Milestones & Achievements

Getting Capital Group Across the Line

Jim Hiltner, Sales Director, closed a tremendous deal with Capital Group in September, with 89 Insights users at $694K in new ACV. This deal was years in the making and was a great multi-departmental achievement. Capital Group is one of the largest and most influential long-only firms in the world, and they now leverage products across our Professional and Enterprise product suites. Congratulations to all who worked on this account — from sales and CSMs, to product, data operations, research and entitlements — and especially to Jim!

300+ Clients

We are also excited to announce that we are now serving over 300 clients across all products.

Awards

Best Training Initiatives, HR Excellence Award, Genius Consulting >

Anil Pereira, HR Leader of the Year, HR

In the News

U.S. Smartwatch Sales Are Soaring >

Wall Street is underestimating how much money Apple will make off 5G, says Jefferies >

Upcoming Events

• Pycon | India | October 12-16
• WFIC | Produced by FISD | Vancouver | October 13-16
• Alternative Data Summit | Produced by Neudata | London | October 29-30

Questions about upcoming conferences? Contact Erin Gifford.

HR News

Ultimate Overarm Cricket Tournament Champion

Visible Alpha emerged as the Ultimate Champion in the Overarm Cricket Tournament in the 5th Edition of Game On, the biggest sports tournament for corporate companies. Twelve teams participated in the tournament, and both Visible Alpha teams met in the finals for the last spin. Congratulation to both the teams!

Inspiring Self and Influencing Others

On September 27-28, a leadership workshop was held in our Noida office to provide the principles, tools and business skills training necessary to enhance self-awareness. It helped participants understand their behaviors, emotions and values, and increase the frequency and quality of conversations about performance and development with team members. Over the next month, participants will focus on applying the skills learned from the workshop.

Product & Operations

Enterprise Product

New Features and Functionality

The refresh for buy-side navigation UI is undergoing testing and scheduled to launch to clients late Q4/early Q1. The navigational refresh provides:

1. Increased content area which allows the users to see more data on the page
2. Updates default landing page to Interactions (dominant client focus)
3. Groups relative settings with content to reduce the amount of effort to complete setup and manage workflow
4. Ability to hide calendar pages at the firm level

For a sneak peek, check out this video >

Project Spark Update

Only one client remains in RTv1: Capital Group, who is in the process of testing the API and targeted to transition mid-October. All other clients have been upgraded to RTv2 (Spark).

Organization Update

The Resource Tracking and Interactions Management teams are merging to create a singular ‘Interactions’ team, which will allow us to focus on data integrity, data unification and enhanced transparency between providers and the buy side. Our focus is to create a single model for interaction data which limits the need for robust syncing processes and duplicative data. The team will be taking an incremental approach to creating this model over the coming months.

For more information about Enterprise, contact Lana Gemmell.

Data Operations

APAC Indices

As we continue to increase coverage in APAC, you can track coverage by index here >

Notable Achievements

1. 3,300+ companies have standardized key operating metrics
2. There are 2,104 international companies covered, neck-to-neck with U.S. coverage of 2,113.

For more information about Data Ops, contact Ravi Shenoy.

Engineering

Implementation of MongoDB

We completed the implementation of MongoDB as a NOSQL database sharded cluster to our Insights infrastructure.

Implementation of Kubernetes

As we have already migrated our application micro-services to docker containers, Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized applications and services that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. Kubernetes provides a platform to configure, automate, and manage, below are the key features:

1. Intelligent and balanced scheduling of containers
2. Creation, deletion, and movement of containers
3. Easy scaling of containers
4. Monitoring and self-healing abilities

Currently we have migrated UAT and STAGE-APP over kubernetes and soon it will be rolled out to APP.

Enterprise Stack Services Consolidation

Consolidation of services in Enterprise stack helped to simplify our sprawling infrastructure drastically and reduce overall TCO. This has helped us to save direct $10K per month on our spending for infrastructure hosting. For more details, click here >

Further, MSSQL Enterprise to Standard migration is in pipeline which will help us to save additional $6K monthly.

MySQL 5.6 to MySQL 8.0

Upgradation of underlying database infrastructure from MySQL 5.6 to MySQL 8.0 is under progress. MySQL 8.0 has new key improvements over 5.6:

1. Improved security
2. JSON datatype support
3. Group Replication with parallel replication threads for High Availability
4. New MySQL Shell
5. Performance improvement

For more information about Engineering’s initiatives, please contact Amar Vira.

Clients & Contributors

Client & Contributor Resources

Company story: A broker war erupts between Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade and E*Trade

The online broker war escalated last week after market leader Charles Schwab slashed trading commissions to zero in an effort to ward off start-ups such as Robinhood, a free-trading app that is widely popular with millennials. TD Ameritrade and E*Trade were quick to follow suit with similar announcements. Peeling the band-aid off trading fees this quickly surprised analysts who have started to dramatically revise trading commission estimates lower.

For additional information, click here >

Competitor News

 In the News

• Dealogic Completes the Acquisition of Selerity >
• PitchBook partners with RSRCHXchange to create comprehensive marketplace >

Fun Facts

Keep your audience engaged

What to do when you’re losing your audience during a presentation >

Random fact of the day

Elephants are the only mammals that can’t jump.