Technology Overview

The Time Has Arrived For SaaS Applications Delivered In The Cloud In Commodity Trading & Risk Management

Web-based applications are not new, but they are creating a new paradigm in trading and risk management circles around the globe. The idea of deploying software applications via the Web using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model began around 1999. The same year, Aspect Enterprise Solutions (then called OILspace) was launched with a vision of innovation in technology and competitive advantage for energy companies. Aspect saw the future in SaaS – and now SaaS and Cloud Computing.

SaaS is software solutions delivered as a service on the Web. These solutions are enabled by Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is Internet-based computing where shared services, resources and software are provided on-demand. There’s no software to load or hardware to host or maintain for the client. Users access their applications on the Web from anywhere.

Aspect is a young company with the latest technology and a proven success rate with its growing list of customers and products. The Aspect architecture was built from the ground up to support powerful systems for today’s industry professionals that are embraced by trading companies globally.

Commodities trading and risk management (CTRM) is in a state of rapid change. The catalyst is three-pronged: A global tightening of the regulatory and corporate governance environment surrounding the buying and selling of commodities such as energy and agricultural products; shrinking lines of credit; and a growing consensus that legacy client-server architecture, the established delivery mechanism for CTRM solutions, must make way for Web-delivered next-generation SaaS and Cloud Computing.

Smart, Flexible, Module Applications

The Aspect Enterprise is fully scalable, integrates with your existing systems and grows in-step with your business. Our solutions are developed as components allowing companies to incrementally integrate solutions as challenges arise, add new functionality as needed, and maintain investments in current systems.

Deployment Options

• Aspect offers its applications using SaaS. Aspect hosts its applications on its own premises, provides system administration, maintenance, security and monitoring. This option is quick to deploy: a new company can go on-line instantly with AspectDSC and AspectCTRM Lite applications; and it can take just a matter of weeks to configure and deploy the AspectCTRM Standard Edition for a new client depending on specific requirements. Click Here To View More Information About SaaS.
• For clients that prefer to host AspectCTRM on their own premises, Aspect offers a complete range of local installation options designed to meet different capacity requirements.

All Aspect applications process data in Unicode. This means that clients can work with data in any language or multiple languages simultaneously, and all our applications are designed with an explicit user interface translation layer; this means that they can be translated to practically any language.

Aspect applications are built on a Sun Java platform and use Oracle RDBMS for data persistence.

Scalability

Aspect applications are designed to scale vertically and horizontally to fit customers’ requirements and expectations in the most efficient way.

• The smallest locally installed AspectCTRM configuration can be deployed on just one commodity server, which is enough to support operations and decision support in a small trading company. As the client's capacity requirements grow, the hardware AspectCTRM runs on can be gradually expanded. To clients with the highest capacity demands, AspectCTRM provides clustering option where the load is distributed across multiple application servers and complex analytical reports are run in a grid mode employing many processors and many servers.
• Our SaaS configurations are equally flexible, with the additional benefit that Aspect provides parts of its infrastructure for a fraction of cost.

Security

Aspect applications employ a range of tools and techniques to ensure the safety and security of our customers’ data.

• All communication between the client's computer and Aspect applications are done over the SSL protocol, which guarantees security in transit. In its SaaS environment Aspect uses Cisco PIX firewalls and Cisco SSL-enabled load balancers to protect its systems at the network level.
• In its SaaS environment Aspect uses passwords as the primary means to authenticate users. User passwords can either be automatically generated by Aspect applications' platform, or chosen by the users, subject to a set of configurable rules to ensure passwords' strength. AspectCTRM, when installed locally, supports LDAP- and Microsoft Active Directory-based authentication, including single sign-on using Kerberos protocol.
• Our applications control what users can or cannot do using fine-grained role-based access control mechanisms. Clients' security administrators can flexibly regulate users' access to subsets of data and to specific parts of functionality.
• Aspect applications maintain detailed audit records, which record data modifications and other important events. These records are available to clients' security administrators through a number of reports.

Integration

Aspect applications provide a family of Web services for integration with external systems. These may be used to synchronize data, such as trades and market prices, between Aspect applications and other systems. Third-party applications or clients’ internal systems can use the functionality of the Aspect applications automatically via Web services, according to the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm.