FactSet, a global provider of integrated financial information, analytical applications, and industry-leading services, in collaboration with Microsoft, today launched a cloud-based data platform, FactSet Data Exploration. FactSet Data Exploration will allow financial professionals to instantly evaluate alternative and financial datasets and build investment applications in a fully hosted environment provided by Microsoft Azure. It will offer content from the Open:FactSet Marketplace alongside programming tools, including Microsoft SQL, RStudio, and Python, in a single location.

FactSet Data Exploration on Microsoft Azure will provide customers with complete and immediate data access, reducing the need to invest in costly IT implementation and infrastructure to test data.

This will allow investment professionals to begin analyzing new datasets and derive value more quickly, increasing data usage and availability across the industry. Clients will also be able to explore and extrapolate datasets with inbuilt data visualization software to illustrate and communicate their findings to stakeholders.

“The current need for upfront investment is a huge hurdle when it comes to adopting new data across the industry,” said Rich Newman, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Content and Technology Solutions at FactSet. “Working with Microsoft and their leading Azure platform gives us the ability to remove this challenge while also providing our clients with the capacity they need to build their own investment applications. Azure’s scale and expertise lets us offer the larger data stage the financial industry has been waiting for.”

Over time, FactSet Data Exploration will grow into a full data research environment and will be updated to include content as it becomes available on the Open: FactSet Marketplace. This will allow clients to use new datasets to improve investment strategies without having to address local storage needs. Additional technologies, tools, and applications will also be added to provide investment professionals with one of the most comprehensive data and research environments in the market today.

“Data is the new currency in the cloud, and this currency is growing in importance for every kind of organization and industry,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud + AI at Microsoft. “That’s why we are so excited to be working with the FactSet team. Their financial industry expertise, combined with the enterprise scale and intelligence of Microsoft Azure, are a winning combination for our mutual customers.”

FactSet Data Exploration is offered via the Open: FactSet Marketplace, which launched in April 2018, and is available for investment professionals starting today.

For more information, visit: https://open.factset.com/catalog/products/data-exploration/.