Tamale vs. CodeRed

Tamale - http://www.tamalerms.com/
CodeRed - http://www.coderedinc.com/
Tamale and CodeRed are products dedicated to the collection, maintenance, and categorization of research (both external and internal) for buy-side firms. Both are server based products that integrate with just about everything that an analyst would use to perform research about a ticker or investment theme (IE, Adobe, Email etc.). Both user interfaces are set-up to look like Outlook mailboxes and the functionality of the systems are similar to using any Microsoft product.

A user example for both products.....
Lets say for instance during the course of research an analyst finds a piece of research that they think may be relevant in Reuters Knowledge for creating a Buy Reccomendation or for monitoring a security. All they would have to is simply click on a button that is installed on Adobe to send it to the product's server. The article is automatically tagged by the system as long as there are tickers in the title and added to the database. An anlayst can than add notes to the content to be saved by the system as well.

Althought the products are very similar there are definitely some unique differences between the products.

Tamale - during the Tamale demo I was very impressed with the way that you can input data into the system. From my perspective this was where Tamale was superior to CodeRed. Tamale makes it very easy to classify information and input in the system from any electronic media you are using. I found that this differed from CodeRed in that it was a little more difficult to get a PDF in the system and you really have to customize the input to get it to the area that you want. Although CodeRed allows greater customability, it seemed to me from an input perspective, Tamale offered a superior experience.

CodeRed- during my CodeRed experience, they really stressed the customability of the product. CodeRed can incorporate all kinds of internal data into the system. You can take all the information from your trading system and have it implemented into the system. From my perspective, I understand the possibilities with having a more customizable product, but in the end I could not forsee our analysts going above and beyond what is offered standard in the Tamale project. It also seemed that there would have to be a ton of interaction between us (Research, IT, Trading, Compliance) and Code Red to really get the full value out of the product.

One of the other reasons I was looking into these products was for the possibility of finding a product that can help organize and reduce the amount of broker research are analysts recieve. Tamale was definitely superior to Code Red in organizing this information in the way it categorizes and distributes it into the system.

There were two features that were part of Code Red that were noticably missing from Tamale. The first was a calendar function and the second an RSS aggregator. The calendar function integrated Street Events which was kind of cool. Essentially it took information from Street Events and added it to the calendar in the Code Red system. You could than easily have it added to your personal calendar in Outlook. The RSS aggregator was also interesting but looked like a weak aggregator opposed to other available systems that are out there.

As for pricing Tamale costs more than CodeRed but that difference is reduced if you have more users.

Conclusion - Based on my analysis of the products I would consider both great alternatives for any research department. Functionally there is not too much of a difference but I think that the customization possibilities and the integration of internal data that comes with CodeRed might be the difference maker.