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Product
SS&C is primarily a software company which markets and sells its products/services into seven markets: Insurance entities and pension funds, Institutional asset mgmt, Hedge funds and family offices, Financial institutions (retail banks credit unions), Commercial Lending, Real Estate Property Mgmt, and Municipal Finance. In addition to software, SS&C also provides accounting outsourcing to outside firms.
Industry
Software industry as a whole is maturing and growth is slowing. Software/services one of the largest vertical markets with 62.3 predicted revenues in next year. Financial services industry typically invests more heavily in software since the IT departments in these companies often can't totally handle specialized asset classes and niches that this software is designed to handle. Financial services projected to spend $83 billion on IT in 2004 with $62 billion on software alone. Technology spending in financial services market driven by the growth in the underlying assets, transaction volumes and complexity of securities. Since financial assets are projected to grow annually at 8% (to 26$ trillion by 2007), financial software should grow at the same rate. According to Yahoo, area that is vulnerable is the best-of-breed that specialize in certain niches. No backup plan if growth stalls in that niche industry. SS&C operates in many niches, not just one.
Industry Driving Forces
There are a few driving forces in the software industry that directly affect SS&C. There is pressure to provide a web component to desktop software (to allow access from internet). Currently only a handful of the SS&C's products are web-based (BancMall). Another pressure ...