Deutsche Morgan Grenfell

Tools Used:
IONA's Orbix™, CORBA®

Description:
Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, a leading global investment bank, has built a complete integrated global trading system with IONA's Orbix family of products. The application has been designed to provide multiple remote trading locations with fast, reliable information instantly. This secure broadcasting of information is enabled by IONA's OrbixTalk product.

Orbix from IONA provides the viable implementation of OMG's CORBA standard and that, coupled with its successful track record over a number years made it the right choice for this project," commented Matthew Harrison, Global Repo IT Project Manager at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. "Extending the quality of Orbix into a multi-channel message distribution tool, OrbixTalk gave us the advantage we needed to deliver a distributed architecture within record time."

The Deutsche Morgan Grenfell system has been designed to support multiple trade types and can be installed from the Web onto a low cost platform with low maintenance thereafter. In addition, the system is not only flexible, it is scalable to support future growth in trade volumes. The system is available during the trading times for every location, providing 24/7 availability. When the project is complete, the system will service the financing needs of Over-The-Counter (OTC) derivatives, proprietary and debt capital markets positions.

The application holds a copy of all the relevant data the user needs for the currency or market they are working with in the client computer, and then updates that data in real-time. This is achieved by distributing data between database servers located in the major sites. Each database server then broadcasts any data to the local clients connected to it when the data is logged. The client then chooses to accept or ignore the broadcast data even depending on whether it is currently subscribing to the type of data.

The advantages of holding all the data in the client are flexibility and speed. The user is able to request any combination of data query and get a response almost instantly because the data is stored in the client. Since the client is already holding all the data, updates come in the form of individual trades, which can be applied as deltas to the existing data. The client avoids having to re-query the database every time there is a change since the user can simply press a refresh button.

The target performance for the system will be less than one second for a trade (once approved on one client to update the position on all other clients connected to the same database server) and less than 20 seconds for trade entered in another site.