Screen Based Trading System for Securities from CMC Limited
Mumbai’s stock exchange (BSE) is India’s premier stock exchange with a 125-year history. 5000 scrips are listed on the Exchange and trading has taken place traditionally through its 600 member brokers and 2000 traders.
When BSE wanted to shift from “open out-cry” to automated trading environment, CMC was entrusted with the responsibility of developing BSE On Line Trading (BOLT) application on a proprietary Tandem platform. CMC successfully executed this challenging assignment and the BOLT has been operational since March 1995, catering to the diverse requirements of the application.
During the course of BOLT development, CMC envisaged future expansion in this domain keeping in view the requirements of the numerous regional stock exchanges in India. To cater to this segment of the market, a cost-effective application was essential. As assured by the international professional organisation, Unix by then had matured to handle Online Transaction Processing applications. Unix’s compliance with open standards also guaranteed cost-effectiveness. CMC thus decided to develop this application as a product on Unix.
As is usually the phenomenon worldwide, there was a vivid increase in volumes at BSE after computerisation. Hence Regional Stock Exchanges in India also expressed a desire to implement a cost effective solution in the shortest duration comprehensible. CMC utilised its expertise and experience in this field to conceive and develop Versatile Engine for Centralised Trading and On-Line Reporting (VECTOR) within a period of 15 months to comply to the unique requirements of Indian securities industry and also make it generic to adapt to international requirements.
VECTOR back-end has been developed on Unix operating system using Sybase RDBMS engine. The GUI front-end has been developed using Object-Oriented programming tools on Windows NT operating system. The software is modular in nature and plug-in modules of the application have been installed. VECTOR’s availability on Unix enables the software to run on enormous range of alternative hardware from small microcomputers all the way to supercomputers to cope with increasing demand.
After distinctive successes at Pune Stock Exchange and Vadodara Stock Exchange, six exchanges viz Coimbatore, Ludhiana, Cochin, Indore, Kanpur and Hyderabad are under various stages of turnkey implementation. Numerous installations of VECTOR have now encouraged the possibility of integrating these Stock Exchanges into a homogenous group.
VECTOR has already been ported on four different platforms, HP-UX, DEC-Unix, Silicon Graphics – IRIX and Stratus FTX to cater to the eight installations of VECTOR. VECTOR has been a source of pride for CMC and it has been instrumental in placing CMC at the helm in providing IT solutions for securities industries.
