Programmed trading

The top securities organization uses tableBASE in four applications to manage their programmed trading processes. Almost 10 years ago, they began a project with a goal of consolidating their IT resources onto distributed systems, and migrating away from the mainframe. Early on, they realized that their tableBASE-powered applications were so critical to the value of their organization, that they could not replace them, and therefore, could not fully migrate from the mainframe. They just could not match the power and flexibility of their tableBASE-powered applications with any other technology—not 10 years ago, not today and not any time in the near future.

Trade settlements and reconciliations

Another securities organization in the top five on Wall Street uses tableBASE-powered applications to run their trade settlement and reconciliation processes. Years after commissioning a third-party to build their systems, there was an internal reorganization. The new administration wanted an all-IBM shop, and targeted tableBASE as a vendor that they wanted to remove from their mainframe systems, in a cost-cutting and consolidation effort. After replacing all of the tableBASE API calls in their most critical application with DB2 calls, they found a disturbing reality in their initial testing. Processing that took the tableBASE-powered application 20 minutes of elapsed time, now took the DB2-accessing application more than 48 hours. Exactly how much, they were not sure—they stopped the test. They, too, realized that their tableBASE-powered applications themselves, were critical to the value of their organization, and could not be replaced with the technology that they hoped would do the job. They are still running their tableBASE-powered applications today.

Options trading

The number three securities organization used tableBASE-powered applications to handle all of their options trading processes. We aren’t even sure what it is they’re doing exactly—they won’t tell us. They know that their tableBASE-powered applications are a significant competitive advantage to their organization, and will not discuss the advantages with anyone. The intent is to keep their advantage from their competition at all costs. They have quietly upgraded as needed, and continue to pay maintenance today.

Batch window processing

The number four securities organization on the NYSE uses tableBASE-powered applications to run their off-hours batch processing. A loosely-similar process to that used in the banking industry, the organization was having serious trouble getting all of their daily batch processing done before the start of business the following day. Their batch processing was taking up to eight hours to complete—their batch window was almost completely full. Faced with a full batch window, and still growing demands on their mainframe data, they turned to DataKinetics for a solution. Without actually changing their applications beyond replacing I/O calls with tableBASE API calls, they were able to reduce their batch window processing time from eight hours to just one hour.

Benefits

In every case, tableBASE mainframe optimization technology was able to deliver a unique and powerful solution to the varied problems facing the most successful brokerage houses. More performance and faster processing using existing systems and applications without the need of costly upgrades.