Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - November 2007 - (Page 52)

INVESTOR RELATIONS MANAGEMENT Rank 2007 1 2 3 4 5 2006 1 4 3 — 2 Firm BACKSTOP SOLUTIONS GROUP SAGE SOFTWARE PERTRAC FINANCIAL SOLUTIONS NETAGE SOLUTIONS SS&C TECHNOLOGIES BACKSTOP SOLUTIONS GROUP Jeremie Bacon, 32, President and Chief Executive Officer JEREMIE BACON IS A GOOD LISTENER. In his previous role as a junior executive at Goldman, Sachs & Co., where he serviced the firm’s brokerage clients, Bacon heard countless hedge fund managers grouse about their investor relationship systems. And it got him thinking. “I said, ‘Hey, there has to be something we can do to make it easier,’ ” he recalls. In 2003, Bacon co-founded Backstop to provide easy-touse investor relations management software. His service quickly caught on, and Backstop now has 105 hedge fund and fund-of-hedgefunds clients. For a tiny company — 37 employees, including Bacon — Backstop is making a big impression. As Bacon sees it, rapid expansion of the hedge fund industry created a class of new fund managers equipped with solid trading backgrounds yet lacking operational business experience. By aiding their IR management, he believes, Backstop will allow fund managers to keep their focus on investing. possible opportunities for new investment. Sage Software moves up two notches from its fourthplace showing last year. Act!, the company’s widely used IR management system, was acquired from Best Software in 2000 and has since been substantially upgraded — particularly its reporting and tracking capabilities, which are available online. Sage touts Act!’s ability to interface with a wide range of systems and tools, allowing users to access client databases and create reports in a variety of ways. In August, Sage announced 60 new tools, providing additional options for everything from reporting to product management and sales. The company also recently enhanced its interface with the BlackBerry mobile device. Rounding out the overall winners in Investor Relations Management are PerTrac Financial Solutions, Netage Solutions and SS&C Technologies. PerTrac, which touts a customer base of more than 225 hedge funds and alternative investment ﬁrms, holds tight to its No. 3 ranking. Netage, a provider for bigger hedge funds that boasts an easily personalized system, is in this year’s No. 4 spot. And SS&C Technologies, which was acquired by Carlyle Group and taken private in 2005, ﬁnishes ﬁfth, down from No. 2. 52 • INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR’S ALPHA • NOVEMBER 2007 ORDER MANAGEMENT O rder management systems are often the backbone of a large fund’s trading operation — big, expensive and difﬁcult to get just right. Not only do the systems ship and track orders and help monitor compliance, they communicate seamlessly and rapidly with other software, such as portfolio accounting and risk management systems. Ideally, they can access multiple asset classes and international destinations. Because such systems are designed for universal use, they tend to be more complicated, and expensive, than small hedge funds need. Indeed, Jeromee Johnson, president of New Hope, Pennsylvania–based trading software provider 3D Markets, believes most hedge funds can get by without an OMS until they have $1 billion under management. Nonetheless, expansion of hedge funds, both in number and size, has proven an enticing growth market for OMS

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - November 2007

Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - November 2007 Contents Letter from the Editor Longs & Shorts Pension Corner: Patriot State The Good Guys: College Connection Interview: Currency of Change Cover Story: Comeback Kid Strategies: Masters of Art Research Center: Alpha Awards: Top Technology Providers Top Analysts Alpha Bytes: Critical Choice Unhedged: Commentary: Banking on a Bubble

Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - November 2007

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.