Eighty percent of buy-side traders are dissatisfied with their order management systems, according to a study by TABB Group. That's four out of five traders. In addition, 33 percent of advancedtrading.com readers named challenges with their OMSs and EMSs as their biggest overall challenge, ahead of dealing with regulations such as Reg NMS and MiFID, keeping up with technology, managing broker relationships, and even dealing with fragmented markets. The tremendous level of dissatisfaction has pushed many OMS vendors to move upgrade plans into high gear.

The OMS/EMS world is finally starting to change -- and rapidly. Not too long ago I thought the OMS, the central technology for the buy-side trader, was in danger of becoming obsolete. There seemed to be an opening for a new type of vendor -- an execution management vendor or a completely new player -- to come in and shake up the market by offering a revolutionary technology that would solve all the problems the current OMSs couldn't seem to shake. I guess those thoughts were a little naive. That would entail inviting a new vendor in and unwinding the OMS legacy embedded in many buy-side firms' infrastructures -- not to mention changing traders' workflows. Even EMS vendors, which have made tremendous inroads on buy-side desks, can't push out the OMS.

The bottom line is that although OMS vendors have been slow to adapt to buy-side traders' calls for change, they have been given a reprieve -- a chance to reinvent themselves -- simply because they are just too ingrained in the trading process.

And reinvent they have. In just the last few months, ITG has said it will integrate its newly purchased Macgregor OMS into Triton, its EMS. (It will continue to offer and support Macgregor XIP.) BNY ConvergEx announced a new OMS/EMS bringing together its EMS technology with EZE Castle's OMS. LongView is working on a new version of Linedata and announced a synchronized blotter with Goldman's REDI. And the list goes on. (For more OMS/EMS vendor news, visit advancedtrading.com/oms-ems-roundup.)

When we first started covering this topic, almost every trader we talked to was looking to replace the OMS. At a roundtable discussion AT held in March, frustration with vendors was at an all-time high. Traders were ready to throw in the towel and try anything but the systems they were using. In a mere matter of months, their tunes have changed. At a second roundtable discussion in July, traders were talking about the new offerings solving many of their problems. They expressed new confidence in their systems and talked about vendors' willingness to listen and act on their behalf. Yes, many issues still exist, and there is still much work to be done, as Dan Safarik reports in this month's special report on evaluating OMS and EMS systems (see Do You Need An Execution Management System Or Will The Order Management System Suffice?). But the OMS is here to stay.