SIRCA launches powerful new cloud analytics platform for its member community and selects Morningstar as a new data provider

SIRCA, the leading provider of data to academics in Australia and New Zealand, has announced the launch of a new collaborative analytics platform, SIRCA Gateway, to support researchers. The SIRCA Gateway will not only enable SIRCA members to access new and improved data sets, it offers advanced cloud-based tools to analyse vast amounts of information. It also lays the foundation to build new tools for teachers and students in undergraduate courses.

SIRCA’s vast collection of financial markets data, which is housed on the platform, has also been expanded. Consistent with our quest to continuously add to the data collection, our recent collaboration with Morningstar now makes available:

• Company Fundamentals Data – sourced from Morningstar’s Global Equity Data feeds.
• End of Day Prices and Corporate Actions information covering the United States, Australia & New Zealand – sourced from Morningstar’s Real-Time Market Data feeds.
• Managed Investments Data for Australia and New Zealand – sourced from Morningstar’s renowned Fund Data feeds next release

SIRCA is delighted to be affiliated with Morningstar as their premium data provider. SIRCA will now be able to offer Morningstar’s data covering fundamentals, corporate actions, end of day pricing and, in future, Morningstar’s premium collection of funds data.

“We are delighted to see US and New Zealand data included in the offering given the relevance to our local researchers.” said Professor Henk Berkman from University of Auckland.

“We are excited about the collaboration with SIRCA, which provides the research community with access to high quality data on domestic companies and managed investments, along with a sub-set of our global coverage.”, said Heather Brilliant, CEO, Morningstar Australasia. “For many years, Morningstar has worked with universities in Australia and New Zealand and we are looking forward to continuing and extending that alongside SIRCA.”

The powerful analytics engine leveraging Big Data analytics product Databricks is another significant addition to the platform’s capabilities. The SIRCA Gateway now enables researchers to analyse data in the cloud with all the benefits that cloud computing brings. Powerful, cloud based processing combined with new data sets and tools will help researchers accelerate analytic processes, test hypothesis, and promote more effective collaboration wherever they are. Researchers will be able to join data sets, introduce external data sets, share their analysis and work collaboratively with members building a true global online academic community.

This initiative will also provide a clearer path to the commercialisation for academics whose research is often related to growing the economy or increasing the transparency of markets for end consumers. A number of different platforms were analysed. The cloud based one was chosen as it serves the needs of large data sets that academics need to analyse to deliver innovative research. SIRCA was conscious of the needs of Database Managers within the universities who support researchers to be able to rapidly create and combine analytic datasets without incurring the overhead of managing or running the infrastructure. David Sharp, CEO SIRCA says the new data and platform capabilities are a significant step forward in providing our research community economies of scale and ease of access to new data sets and compute power. The SIRCA Gateway platform also provides the teaching community with new flexible and efficient tools to make analytics easily accessible for students.

“The SIRCA Gateway is a further example of our pioneering culture as it connects best-of-breed data sets with serious compute power. It enables our subscribers to swiftly build and deploy advanced analytics solutions, and bridge the gap between raw data and insights. We look forward to presenting new and expanded data sets quickly and cost effectively to our community. SIRCA Gateway gives us the platform that empowers academics to conduct research studies more efficiently and more expansively.”

Academics will be able to research in ways never supported before. We did not want to restrict the researchers by giving a filtered view of data. Instead, we wanted to empower them to query data, discover insights, join datasets as their research demands. Researchers are demanding more as they leverage analytical languages like R, Python & Scala. Academics can choose from the extensive library of codes that exist in the open source community that facilitate quantitative analytics & machine learning. We want our users to have choice and use whatever tools they are familiar with. Professor Stephen Taylor, Head of Financial Accounting, UTS believes the SIRCA Gateway will be a key enabler of financial market research, and will be welcomed by our academic research community. After a preview of the new cloud based analytics platform Professor Taylor stated:

“The SIRCA Gateway provides a truly unique opportunity for anyone who wants better insight into large-scale and complex financial markets data. It not only provides new and extensive data sets, it allows researchers to save time, control their analytics using their preferred programming language, and collaborate more easily.”