NASDAQ and cloud-based data distribution technology maker Xignite have introduced a new tool called Mass It’s part of NASDAQ Data-On-Demand, a historical stock trade and quote data cloud service, and is available free to Premier subscribers of Data-On-Demand (also powered by Xignite). What it does is bring big data tools to the masses, helping them better understand the market from multiple perspectives.  Mass Download is the first offering of its kind in the financial market, and delivers users terabytes of stock trade and quote data generated every year based on precise filtering. Customers can screen out datasets based on ticker symbols, data fields, dates and times they specify.

“One great example is analytics. Instead of downloading billions of trades into your own database just to calculate analytics like Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP) or backtesting your strategies, you can now ask Data-On-Demand to give you only the data you need or even do the calculations for you.”

Analytics is huge emphasis which naturally pops up whenever the term big data is mentioned, and Mass Download may prove to be a valuable cost cutter in this field for NASDAQ Data-On-Demand customers. Another benefit of the service is that it’s completely automated, and comes with a handy online interface which enables users to select the custom data sets they want and then schedule those data sets to be generated when they want. Moreover, NASDAQ also released an API for their offering, which enables to be requested, sent to and viewed from 3^rd party applications.

Big data analytics is a trend that’s really picking up in the financial space, and one indicator of that is Informatica’s earnings call. The data integration software maker heavily targeting financial institutions reported record-breaking first quarter earnings. The company generated total revenues of $168.0 million in the first quarter of 2011, which is up 24 percent year-over-year. GAAP earnings per also broke records in addition to license revenues, which grew almost 50 percent and 30 percent compared to the previous year, respectively.

Greenplum’s also been an influential driver for the finance industry’s uptake of cloud services, especially around big data analytics and processing.  It’s a leader in the industry, and has an ongoing relationship with NASDAQ, and a number of other key financial institutions that revel in the growing power of big data of the future.  Its earlier acquisition by EMC has positioned Greenplum well for future business needs–see our discussion and analysis here.