The Problem
The client wanted to extend its business model and improve revenue generation by establishing an electronic exchange and offering a trading service to other options trading firms. The client needed to develop a large scale distributed system to manage these operations. Additionally, the client wanted to reduce operational costs by replacing a commercial trading package with a combination of several in-house components.

• The Client
• The Problem
• The Project
• Services Provided
• The Solution
• Benefits of Solution
• Results
• Contact

The Project
OCI provided architecture consultation, technical evaluation of proprietary and open source products, and design, development, testing, deployment, and support of software components to support the client's primary trading application.  Software developed by OCI included a library of components for order management, market data feed termination, connection management, and other supporting features, as well as other ancillary systems.

Services Provided

• Architecture consultation
• Technology evaluation
• Software design, development, testing, deployment, and support
• Management of the development, build, and test environment
• Mentoring of client personnel

The Solution
The client initially engaged OCI for architecture consultation to establish a scalable distributed computing infrastructure. OCI’s role quickly expanded to include technical evaluations of open source and proprietary products, and development and maintenance of a software library to support the client’s primary trading application. The client and OCI together selected both open source and commercial products and technologies in support of the solution, including:

• C++
• ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE)
• Boost
• The ACE ORB (TAO)
• eXtremeDB memory-resident database management system
• IIOP.net
• Latency Busters Messaging (LBM)
• Make Project Creator (MPC)
• QuickFIX

Benefits of Solution

• Design decisions based on thorough analysis of all relevant criteria.
• Test-driven software development model, including continuous integration and testing of all code across several target platforms.
• Software development processes based on well-established, routine procedures and well-defined performance objectives and standards.
• Use of a common source code repository across a geographically disbursed team.
• Definition of and adherence to a formal concurrency model.
• Layered software architecture with formal rules for assigning behavior to layers and for managing interactions among layers.
• Appropriate use of in-code documentation and ChangeLogs to capture design intent as well as algorithms.
• Assignment of a strong lead architect to facilitate effective communications amongst all stakeholders, to maintain the "big picture" overview of the project, and to arbitrate decisions.

Results
OCI's involvement in the project enabled the client to roll out their new trading system on schedule, resulting in improved scalability and substantially higher transaction volumes than possible with the commercial trading package, and with significant cost savings due to use of fewer commercially licensed products.  The new system also afforded the client greater flexibility, including the ability to adapt to various exchanges with virtually no impact on traders.  OCI established a trusting relationship with the client's CTO/CIO, which led to streamlined decision making.

Contact Information
To learn how OCI can help you with your mission critical systems, visit http://www.ociweb.com or contact sales@ociweb.com.