Team SunGardians of the Galaxy earned the win with the development of an end-to-end big data and analytics workbench for performing data mining and transformation.

Ravi Kanth, SunGard coder and captain of SunGardians of the Galaxy, said, “With an increased number of financial services companies looking for big data solutions and predictive analytics abilities, our workbench can be used to develop data mining and transformation models for any business application. The program is especially innovative because it can be used with or without machine learning capabilities.”

The 11 Coder Cup 2015 finalist teams were selected from a preliminary group of 68 teams comprised of more than 300 individuals, who participated in the competition’s regional round in June. The resulting finalist teams hailed from Christchurch, New Zealand; Pune, India; Birmingham, Alabama; New York, New York; Tunis, Tunisia; Cape Town, South Africa, and Shanghai, China and included more than 50 SunGard technologists and engineers whose expertise cuts across the global financial services landscape.

“Innovation isn’t easy or conventional,” commented event judge, Jeffery Paul, Intel’s vice president, sales and marketing group, and director, software and services sales organization. “The time constraints and competitive spirit of the 11 SunGard Coder Cup finalist teams created a dynamic environment that ultimately led to some unique results. The winning solution has the capacity to improve current big data and analytics programs.”

“The SunGardians of the Galaxy, and all our finalist teams, generated applications with the potential for adaptation at all levels of the finance industry,” said Steven Silberstein, SunGard’s chief technology officer. “As our Coder Cup events have grown over the past three years, we’ve seen SunGard technologists from around the globe coming together to create something new and different. This year was no different – our employees have continued to show their unwavering commitment to building innovative technologies that can benefit the financial services industry globally.”

At the final round event, the finalist teams were given 48 hours to design and implement an innovative solution that utilizes big data tools and analytics that would be applicable to either internal or client-facing financial systems. A judging panel comprised of SunGard’s chief technology officer, financial industry leaders, and experts from Intel and Microsoft selected the winning solution. SunGard’s Coder Cup competition was sponsored by Intel, with additional support from Microsoft.