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Company

AR Group

“To operate as a financial broker in Italy means being able to offer proven competence and stable, reliable applications. Precisely what we have been doing successfully since 1982. From the very beginning, we have used the Pervasive.SQL database to develop our product applications. For us, Pervasive.SQL has been a strategic choice. It has always guaranteed us the power needed to process huge amounts of data: quickly, accurately and with very low maintenance.”

Roberto Roncoroni, Managing Director of AR Enterprise SpA

About AR Group
The AR Group, specialized in the financial sector, consists of two companies with specific competencies:

1. AR Enterprise designs and develops information systems. It offers a wide range of application modules that are valid operating tools for Front Office, Back Office, Internal Control, General Accounting for savings management firms (for both collective and individual management), interdealer and trading brokers, banks and exchange agents. The various applications are fully compatible and include:

GL General and financial accounting;
GFP Front end for property management;
NetSim Integrated back-office system for interdealer brokers /institutional brokers / savings management firms;
NetFondi Investment fund management (common funds, closed-end mutual funds, hedge funds);
ANM Combined corporate-archive management (anti money-laundering).

2. AR Servizi provides administrative outsourcing services and facility management for the financial sector (back office). It is a leader in the supply of management applications for the intermediation and financial management sectors.

In 2002, the AR Group, a pioneer in the financial-sector applications market, achieved a turnover of 9.7 million euros and employed 87 people. It should therefore come as no surprise that some of the principal credit institutions and savings management companies are AR Group customers: Gruppo Pioneer (Unicredito), Gruppo Banca Intesa, Gruppo Ras, Gruppo Arca, Gruppo UBS, Banca Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Fleming, BIM Intermobiliare, Julius Baer Italia SpA, etc.

Business Challenge
A database that meets all the requirements of financial-sector operators must be fast and stable. It must also be able to process a large amount of data while always maintaining a high level of performance. Personnel in financial institutions must be able to use the database, which is at the core of the application, under stressful conditions – and it must function perfectly. A customer executes thousands of operations: delays and errors are unacceptable, since they could be very expensive. In short, the financial database must have mission-critical features.

The Pervasive Solution
To meet all of these requirements, the AR Group turned to Pervasive. The Group had been a Pervasive customer since 1982 when, then known as Softcraft, it was offering Btrieve, one of the few solid transactional databases on the market. All applications provided by the AR Group are written in C or C++ language combined with Novell or Windows NT OS. Pervasive.SQL is the chosen database system.

There are various reasons why it makes sense to rely on Pervasive Software. The most important one is that it provides large, high-speed, high-performance databases. For example, the use of the Pervasive.SQL database makes it possible for the GFP application (for the automated processing of property management) to manage very complex simulations at high speeds. Orders placed on the market can thus be distributed among various customers, on the basis of the features of each portfolio. The simulation of a distribution relative to the purchase of a security, among a group of 500 customers is performed in only three seconds.

The execution speed of programs processing very large volumes of data is also essential to the NetSim application. Since 1991, it has been installed by dozens of intermediaries of various sizes and types. These include an interdealer broker that is responsible for approximately 26,000 portfolios and a trading interdealer broker that operates on the market with over 50,000 transactions a day. Thanks to Pervasive Software, loading these 50,000 operations requires only around 30 minutes of processing, while the recording in the accounts (involving the writing of over 250,000 lines) takes around 40 minutes. The quarterly report for 26,000 portfolios is produced in approximately four hours.

Bottom Line
Pervasive Software has been fundamental to the AR Group’s success. It has enabled the Group to make enormous strides, leaving its competitors far behind. This is proven by the fact that the AR Group has won a share of between 30% and 50% of the market in which the main Italian and foreign financial concerns operate.

About Pervasive Software^®
Pervasive Software is a leading, global, data-management company. It is the key to the success of application developers, providing solutions that deliver the industry's best combination of performance, reliability and low administrative costs. Pervasive's strength is proved by the size and diversity of its customer base: it serves tens of thousands of customers, in turn having hundreds of thousands of end-users, in nearly every vertical market in the world. Founded in 1994, Pervasive sells its products in more than 150 countries. It is based in Austin, Texas and has offices in Europe.

For more information
To learn more about Pervasive Software and our solutions, please visit www.pervasive.com. To reach the North American sales office, call 1.800.287.4383, extension 2. For Latin, Central and South America, Australia and New Zealand, call +1.512.231.6000. In Europe, for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, call +800.12.12.34.34. For any other European, Middle Eastern, African or Asian countries (excluding Japan), call +32.70.23.37.61. For Japan, please call +81.3.3293.5300, or visit www.pervasive.co.jp.

For further information on the AR Group: www.ar-ent.net