Open Trading Network is born
Open-Trading-Network · David ReganI’m excited to annouce that my new venture Open Trading Network is born!
I’ve worked in the IT industry since leaving University in the early 1990s. I worked for 6 years at IBM at their Hursley Research and Development Lab. I was doing low-level work: initially microcode for point of sale terminals and later real-time Unix and embedded drivers to control the electricity network of South Wales. I left to become a contractor and moved into the financial industry. This was mostly technical/architecture work until I was hired as the team lead for Barcap to integrate a new global oil trading platform into their existing landscape. To say this was a baptism of fire is an understatement; I knew nothing of commodities trading and less about the selected platform, RightAngle. But I did a good job and realised how much more interesting this business was then just the technology behind IT systems. For the next 15 years I built CTRM trading platforms round Europe with RightAngle, Endur, CXL, Aspect enhancing them with custom front ends, planning tools, dash boards, etc. and integrating them into Risk, Finance, Tax reporting adn invoicing and scheduling systems.
More recently, I worked building a global commodities trading solution for metals, coal, concentrates at a mining comglomerate. It was here I met Aspect for the first time. Aspect is a basic CTRM with some innovate features (cloud based, in-memory database, real-time risk) and has an in-built scripting language used primarily for reports. When we started with this product the scripting was fairly basic but we quickly realized it’s potential and over the programme had the vendor develop these features. We used the scripting to solve a major issue with most CTRM projects, namely: meeting bespoke requirements for different business units within a coherent system implementation. Most CTRM projects disappoint their clients by forcing a series of technical or process workarounds on the Business and by scripting extensions to the data model and user interactions we gave each Business unit what the wanted.
It was then I had the idea to create a product using modern technologies to allow Business applications to be built out without the overhead of the usual development cycle. This gave rise to our product, Tesseract, and Open Trading Network Ltd was born to develop the product and provide services to the CTRM sector on the lesson we’ve learnt over the years.
So, watch this space for details of Tesseract and what Open Trading Network is doing…