The P2P cone of silence
At American Century, P2P's aggregation capabilities have a distinct relevance. WorldStreet's aggregation server does the work of amassing financial dataâ€"reports, analysts' projections, white papers and so onâ€"off the peer site servers of securities professionals who want to sell to American Century. That means the buy-side analysts and portfolio managers at American Century needn't log in to those sites themselves to search for data. Therefore, sell-side sites can't monitor American Century's comings and goings.
That gains the company transparency: No intelligence regarding American Century's interests and fields of inquiry leaks out. That's not just smart business for a company whose assets run in the range of $100 billion; it is also mandated by regulatory requirements that prohibit financial companies from exposing their positions regarding a particular security.
Not only that, but using P2P to aggregate data eliminates bandwidth choke points. Because there is no server bottleneck, peers have the muscle to move bandwidth-heavy loadsâ€"hence the wide variety of media that can be handled, including graphics and voice files.
American Century hasn't had to adjust network resources to deal with the increased flow of media for a few reasons, according to Rich Wilkie, vice president of investment management. First, Net allows users to look at either short, abstract versions of files or entire files, which means that it's not always necessary to pull down a large graphics or audio file during prime hours. In addition, streaming audio keeps pipes unclogged with its lean transmission size.
For securities professionals in the trenches, though, the appeal of the Net platform boils down to its ability to filter the mass of communications that face them every morning. The Net application allows them to filter sources of data according to criteria they can specify in the Net application installed on their PCs.
"The basic problem of being an analyst is you have literally hundreds of sources of information," said David Rose, an investment analyst for American Century who's testing the hosted version of Net. "If [Net] saves me an hour of time every day, it will be one more company I can look at every week. That's a competitive advantage."
But what happens to security when all these peers are free to directly connect? Herein lies one of the most often cited P2P concernsâ€"namely, that a network of peers is open to the whole wide world of viruses and hackers.
Not to worry, Wilkie said. WorldStreet has tackled the security question to his satisfaction with a three-tier security systemâ€"one that requires three levels of log-on that can be blocked or opened up to sell-side peers at American Century's discretion. Passwords are stored on a WorldStreet aggregation server. In the next major release, American Century is looking to put that server on-site, but for now, it still has sufficient control over passwords. "We have the option that anybody who sends us information, we can restrict either the master log-on or the individual log-on," Wilkie said.
