RBC Capital Markets Taps Open Source Platform for Fixed Income Applications
With the proliferation of multiple applications on the desktop for each fixed-income product, it can be a challenge for traders at RBC Capital Markets to seamlessly work across a portfolio. "We had tons of applications on the desktop," relates Edwin Park, the investment bank's head of the fixed-income core technology. "People try to trade multiple products in the same portfolio but it becomes difficult to open up all the applications."
To provide its fixed-income traders with a more integrated user experience, RBC has turned to Eclipse, an open source integrated development environment, as the basis for its global fixed-income trading applications. The ongoing project, called Helios, is targeted at bringing front-office trading applications under a single user interface.
"We're building a platform on top of Eclipse to actually deploy applications in a unified way to the desktop," says Park, who is the sole developer working on the project, which will extend into 2010. According to Park, RBC is leveraging Eclipse in two ways: as an integrated development platform to develop its applications and also as a deployment platform. RBC, he explains, created an application container with Eclipse that allows the investment bank to deploy new functionalities as components developed by independent teams so that everything looks and acts like a single application.
Park points out that one of the benefits of adopting the Eclipse technology is that it's popular -- anyone who develops in Java is familiar with Eclipse, he says. "There are a lot of tools delivered as plug-in components you can get from various sources" that come with a lot of built-in functionality, Park adds.
Open Source Gaining Traction
RBC's project is also another sign that open source technology is gaining traction on Wall Street in the wake of the credit crisis. Cash-strapped investment banks that have slashed their IT staffs can use open source solutions -- with their free code and worldwide communities of developers -- to build applications with shared components. In fact analysts are beginning to suggest that brokerage firms look beyond the buy-versus-build paradigm or outsourced solutions and consider open source code as a third alternative to reduce software development costs.
"Open source has become a viable alternative to paying commercial software licensing fees," wrote Tom Price, research director of TowerGroup's securities and capital markets practice, in a recent report. "In addition faster time to market and the potential for shared development across the industry will provide the impetus for firms to consider choosing open source over traditional build-or-buy scenarios."
Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio
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