Another market that Cincom Smalltalk™ has seen usage in is the Financial sector. Below are the stories from a few of our successful customers:
JP Morgan Chase is a leading financial services firm serving capital markets throughout the world.
With assets of $1.1 trillion and a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, capabilities include investment banking, research, private equities, investment management, private banking, and treasury and security services. As one of the world’s leading investment banks, it has extensive relationships with corporations, financial institutions, governments,and institutional investors worldwide. The firm provides a full range of investment banking and commercial banking products and services, including advising on corporate strategy and structure, capital raising in equity and debt markets, sophisticated risk management, and market-making in cash securities and derivative instruments in all major capital markets. It also commits the firm’s own capital to proprietary investing and trading activities.
One of the key elements of JP Morgan’s success is based on one of its differentiators, the time-to-market of new products. Supporting this is a commitment to use information technology to provide this competitive advantage. Using Cincom VisualWorks to develop Kapital, JP Morgan met the challenge of finding a development environment that deals with the complexity of its derivative products, delivers unparalleled productivity to stay ahead of the competition and offers the scalability to support extremely high trading volumes.
“We have estimated that if we had built Kapital in another language such as Java, we would require at least three times the amount of resources.” - Dr. Colin Lewis, Vice President, JP Morgan
Additional details to this story can be found here.
Netherlands-based Soops is a dynamic software development company founded in 1992.
It was the first company in the Netherlands to be fully dedicated to object-oriented technology because its founders believe that this technology best captures the complex and changing needsof organizations working in IT systems. Its decision to use the Cincom Smalltalk development environment from the outset has been key in the company’s ability to seize new business opportunities.
Over the years, Soops has conducted in-depth evaluations of the alternative technologies, in terms of comparative speed of development.
“Time and again, the openness of VisualWorks makes it stand out in a market where the vast majority of environments has parts of code that aren’t open. If the language is less open and there are errors, the customer will have to depend on the supplier for speed of change. This could result in the market being down for a week, which our clients simply can’t afford” – Albert Kerssies, Technical Director, Soops
Developer strategy can no longer be based on brand alone but on performance and the right application for the task. In a climate where there are increasing reports of failed Java and C++ projects, Cincom Smalltalk is viewed by Soops as the most reliable solution.
“Java is good forlightweight applications but can’t match Smalltalk forproductivity and reliability when it comes to complex projects.So far we’ve achieved a 100% success rate with Smalltalk.” - Freek Dech, Managing Director, Soops
With Cincom Smalltalk, programmers learn the language quicker, solve problems faster and write less code, typically one-third to one-half of the code required of a C++/Java programmer. It has been benchmarked as being more productive than some of the other proprietary environments with an estimated 50% increase in programmer productivity(according to Software Productivity Research, www.spr.com).
“The speed of development is so fast that often the client just can’t believe that Soops’ estimation for completion of a project is realistic. For example, we will know that a particular project will take us no more than three months. But from their industry knowledge, the client would expect this same project to take two years. Sometimes it’s hard to convince them otherwise!” - Reinout Heek, Senior Engineer, Soops
According to its website, “SUISA is the Cooperative Society of Music Authors and Publishers in Switzerland. Established as a cooperative association in 1923, it now numbers about 26,000 composers, lyricists and music publishers. SUISA collects the royalties to which its members are entitled for the public use of their works in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Through reciprocity agreements with over 100 sister societies worldwide, SUISA manages the rights of 2 million right-holders.”
SUISA manages “small rights” which include non-dramatic musical works, concert versions of dramatic works and musical works for feature and television films. They then issue licences authorizing its clients (concert organisers, record producers, broadcasting companies and other users) to perform, broadcast and reproduce music.
With legacy systems on CICS and the interface limited to 3270 screens, SUISA needed a better way to represent their 2 million copyright holders across 100 constituent groups to some 90,000 customers in the music business. According to Nick Theofanidis, the Manager of Databases and System Administration Group, SUISA built its GUI-driven, transaction-oriented services on the mainframe with Cincom Smalltalk because it integrated applications with the desktop, independent of platform, and with interfaces to customers worldwide.
“Our expectations have been satisfied. …Cincom Smalltalk can be considered as the gateway to our mainframe business applications.” – Nick Theofanidis
 |  |  |  |
