Lord Abbett, & Co. is a private, independent money management company that manages over $46 billion in assets. The company manages a broad family of mutual funds as well as separately managed equity, fixed-income and balanced accounts for corporations, institutions and individuals.

One of the crucial operations in money management is accurately valuing portfolios and making investment decisions. Both accuracy and timeliness of information are very important. As stock prices change every minute, information needs to be accessed and processed in real time. While making investment decisions, a fund manager also evaluates portfolio related information from internal and external sources. Lord Abbett management wanted to create a system that could consolidate all internal and external portfolio information in one application and provide real-time quotes and news on the holdings. This application was to be the one-stop inquiry system for all portfolio related information.

Lord Abbett needed an application that could access trading data market feeds, accounting and data-warehouse applications. The application would merge data from these sources and present it in an intuitive format to portfolio managers. The IT managers also required that the system provide a scalable solution where functionality could be easily added without redesigning the system.

Lord Abbett chose JReps over JSP™ and ASP™. The company liked JReps' easy implementation and its ability to connect to multiple data-sources. JReps ability to connect to existing business logic and data sources without redesigning any of them was another advantage.

We delivered the Real Time Inquiry System (RTIS) in a few months. As envisioned, the application is now a one-stop inquiry solution that links all relevant internal and external portfolio information sources. The system consists of just a few screens with extensive drill-down capability. Major functions include Intra-day Pricing, Securities Under Management, Transactions, Portfolio Characteristics and Attribution. Where related information could not be presented on the same screen, links are provided. RTIS also includes a comprehensive search functions. Search can be based on account groupings, individual accounts, or specific securities.

JReps delivered in a diversified data jungle. It hid the low-level data access from programmers and provided a powerful screen generation functionality. This enabled basic reports to be delivered in just a few days. Fast implementation was partially possible thanks to JReps' short learning curve. Developers with no in-depth application development experience and were able to create the screens in an extremely short time.

	Faster data access than other in-house intranet applications
	One-stop inquiry application that links internal portfolio and external sources
	Short learning curve developers
	Highly optimized routines built-in; no guru programmer required to implement data retrieval functions
	Code reuse from existing applications