ITG Israel

Creating Quality Customer Service
ITG offers its clients a wide range of solutions throughout the share trading process, beginning with pre-trade analyses, and also includes sophisticated trading, automatic trading and post-trade analysis tools. Around one-half of the company's 1,000 employees are technology personnel who work at development centers located in six sites around the world. The vast majority of the 60 employees at ITG's Israeli center in Herzliya Pituah, Israel are software developers.

Boaz Bash, vice president of software development at ITG explains the importance of a dependable technology solution, "At ITG's Israeli development center, we write software that comprises part of ITG's worldwide basket of products and services that it offers to customers. In Israel, we maintain a number of development groups with some of us working on global products and others developing more specific technologies for the needs of ITG Europe."

A long-standing customer, ITG has created years of success with Sybase technology, Bash explains, "Things have remained as they used to be. ITG started writing its systems about 15 years ago on Sybase infrastructure. When it comes to all aspects of database systems in the financial world, Sybase is considered the de facto standard."  Sybase has achieved this lofty distinction thanks to the system's unchallenged stability. "Many of the transactions in the financial world involve large sums of money, and no company in our industry can afford the loss or distortion of any transaction whatsoever."

ASE – The Backbone of the IT Infrastructure
An important component of a larger technology infrastructure, ASE continues to be a strong solution, "ITG uses numerous technologies. We have client systems that are written in Java, servers that are written in C and run on UNIX; there are Visual C++ systems, Web systems, systems that are written in C#, and more," notes Boaz Bash. "All these applications in which ITG has invested hundreds of man hours are linked by, and communicate via, Sybase ASE. In fact, it would be correct to say that Sybase is our back line – our stable anchor where most of the information is concentrated. And on this infrastructure, ITG has developed a wide range of systems, with each providing a specific solution to a certain stage in the stock trading cycle."

Bash explains the steadfast support for Sybase ASE, "Undoubtedly, Sybase's most prominent characteristic is its stability. During the five years I have been working at ITG, I have not experienced a single significant failure or crash with Sybase ASE. I am not a newcomer in this field, and I have worked with other databases. In my opinion, they cannot compete with ASE's stability. This is Sybase's biggest competitive edge, and this is what enables it to maintain its status as a leader in the financial world. Every era has its buzz words and new trends; trends come and go, and Sybase remains."