http://www.microsoft.com/BackOffice/reading/tullet.htm (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)By Mary Jo Foley
Some of the leading vendors in the securities trading industry--a longtime Unix stronghold--are on the cusp of adopting Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT to build distributed, object-based financial applications.
One of the first securities firms to implement NT as a trading system is Tullett & Tokyo Forex Inc., a money-market, derivative exchange, and brokerage firm in New York.
Until about a year ago, Tullett & Tokyo used several third-party applications to calculate derivatives. These packages ran on a variety of DOS, Windows, and Unix desktops connected to Unix servers. Besides interacting with disparate applications and platforms, traders were required to manage data feeds from multiple sources.
Tullett & Tokyo decided to simplify its trading environment by developing a single groupware trading application that would run on NT and Windows desktops, NT compute servers, and a Unix back-end server. The resulting application--fondly known as The Beast--was developed with Microsoft's Visual C++ and Tullett & Tokyo's own tools on top of Windows NT.
"NT was mandated by the need to keep costs low and our sights high for pricing [interest rate] swaps, FRAs [Forward Rate Agreements], and more exotic products," said Carl Carrie, vice president of proprietary derivatives with Tullett & Tokyo's Information Technology division. Swaps and FRAs are two kinds of derivative instruments.
"Unix was a safe bet, but a lot more expensive," Carrie said. "NT is a lot more reliable than people give it credit for. It's got multithreading, multiprocessing, and the ability to be extended."
NT currently is not an object-oriented operating system, however, which puts limits on companies like Tullett & Tokyo that are attempting to build distributed object applications.
"We were pleasantly surprised with the performance improvements we found in migrating to NT 3.5," Carrie said. "Ideally, we would like to see Cairo here earlier, but if not, we'll just have to stick with NT. NT has gotten a bad rap. It rarely, if ever, crashes. The networking is fine. We've used it as the foundation for our integrated platform."
Since Cairo, Microsoft's object-oriented follow-on to NT 3.5, isn't expected to ship until 1996 at the earliest, Tullett & Tokyo was left to develop its own method for distributing objects across platforms. "As COM [the Microsoft/Candle Corp./Digital Equipment Corp. Common Object Model architecture] comes on-line, we will move to that," said Carrie.
"We build everything with object orientation in mind," he said. "Object technology allows us to do cross-platform computations. And it makes things easier for our developers, even though we have to break the mold in designing a lot of things."
Tullett & Tokyo is not alone in pioneering object development. Brokerages typically are high on the list of firms that can't wait for Microsoft's and other vendors' technology to catch up to their needs, said Jeff Leopold, director of client/server research with The Yankee Group Inc., in Boston.
However, "you don't need an object-oriented operating system to write object-oriented applications," Leopold said. "You can use an object development environment. Having an object-oriented operating system would be easier, but it's not required."
Tullett & Tokyo has nearly completed its move from NT 3.1 to NT 3.5. The firm is in the midst of a live pilot program involving 24 NT compute servers acting as front ends to a Sun Microsystem Computer Corp. Unix data server.
The firm plans to extend the pilot program to include hundreds of NT workstations and servers across the entire division, Carrie said. As it progresses in its deployment, Tullett & Tokyo is likely to add Microsoft SQL Server and Systems Management Server to its mix, he said.
Problem: Brokers at Tullett & Tokyo were using a number of incompatible third-party applications on different hardware platforms to do derivative calculations.
Solution: The firm's Information Technology division designed an integrated groupware trading application using Visual C++ on top of Windows NT that could handle multiple data feeds simultaneously.
Payoff: By replacing more costly Unix systems with NT, Tullett & Tokyo cut costs, while bringing standardization across its traders' desktops.
What's Next: The brokerage is planning to extend its 24-system pilot to hundreds of NT workstations and servers. Distributed object technology will be a key piece of the system's design.
