ASX opens data science PaaS up to third parties

The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has opened its data platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to third parties seeking to partner with the exchange to explore data challenges.

The DataSphere was first pitched in early 2019 as a way for customers to get more value out of their own data and access a governed data platform without upfront investment costs.

Workspaces, dashboards and APIs are hosted on the web-based platform, which was developed in partnership with TIBCO, Cloudera, Talend and Virtustream.

The platform has three main functionalities: data-as-a-service, data commercialisation, and data collaboration.

Data-as-a-service allows customers to organise and govern data for personal use or for analytics alongside other data in the DataSphere workspace.

The data commercialisation stream optimises data for sale or rent through the DataSphere marketplace or the ability to licence it for use on products built on the platform.

Data collaboration is touted as a way to enhance the value of data by pooling it with datasets from the bourse and others for products built on deeper insights.

Since launching last year, the platform has significantly expanded the ASX datasets available and now includes assets from third parties, ASX executive general manager of trading services David Raper said.

“We’re opening up new and unique datasets. Our growing catalogue of ASX and non-ASX datasets span fixed income, interest rate, derivatives, equities, and benchmarks,” Raper said in a statement.

“We’re already working with customers to build data products within the fixed income space. We’re also making historical versions of ASX’s market data and ReferencePoint products available.”

Users also have the ability to request additional datasets be added to the catalogue of resources available on the platform.

Partners have the choice of two secure, scalable workspaces within DataSphere, which include analytical tools and curated datasets based on each customer’s requirements.

Business workspaces within DataSphere are designed for business users, and provide data visualisations and spreadsheets for analysis.

Private data can also be uploaded to the workspace.

Data science workspaces, meanwhile, are designed for data scientists and developers, providing popular analytical tools and programming languages as well as the ability to collaborate on product development.

“The platform has been developed to be flexible and customer-centric, whilst adhering to industry leading data governance and security standards,” Raper added.