INDUSTRY

Platform Computing today announced that Gaselys, a joint venture created in 2001 by Société Générale and Gaz de France, has successfully implemented Symphony. Symphony, a financial services software solution, performs very complex price and risk calculations in real-time delivering a crucial advantage in the competitive world of financial trading rooms. Within strategic and highly volatile energy traded markets, IT infrastructure and computing capacity are critical to the success of business. Companies including Gaselys that are trading commodities such as oil, natural gas, energy and complex derivative products require precise snapshots of their market exposure and competitive pricing. Furthermore, like other investment firms, Gaselys is subject to specific regulatory constraints and must provide a number of indicators requiring compute-intensive, complex and high-volume calculations every day. "Gaselys’ ability to do business is based on the production of accurate risk analyses," said Gaselys’ Managing Director, Philippe Vedrenne. "When the installation was completed, calculations that were previously too compute-intensive to run more than once per day on one dedicated server were available in real-time. Platform’s Symphony offers sustainable competitive advantage of superior grid computing." Platform Symphony: Gaselys’ Preferred Software of Choice Gaselys anticipated the potential advantages of grid computing as early as 2003, and Platform Symphony quickly became the preferred software of choice. Gaselys implemented a server farm available 24 hours a day, on which fast calculations primarily intended for the trading room are carried out during the day and heavier calculations overnight. Virtual computing grids distribute the workload and enhance the use of available computing power. Another powerful feature of the solution is its scalability. When peaks in activity or changes occur, machines can be easily added to the server farm to increase the computing power of the system without intervention on the application layer. "Our customers appreciate the fact they can organize their calculation demands in relation to their business needs in real-time," said Charlie Jarvis, Vice President, European Financial Services, Platform Computing. "In addition to a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership, Gaselys will have observed a constant improvement in performance, allowing the company to make faster and more precise decisions." In an effort to efficiently use the capacities of their dual-core and blade servers, Gaselys will continue to install new versions of Platform Symphony, integrating technological breakthroughs in microprocessors in order to maintain the competitive advantage Platform offers its customers.