INDUSTRY

Sal. Oppenheim, one of the leading private banks in Europe, will use a Grid supercomputing strategy to speed up complex, compute-intensive scenario-based models used for pricing and risk calculations to enable the private bank to make better-informed decisions to maintain its competitive edge in the equity derivatives trading market. Founded in 1789, Sal. Oppenheim has about 1500 employees at 20 locations around Germany and Europe and manages 61 billion Euros in funds. In the equity derivatives trading division, Sal. Oppenheim processes large volumes of data for scenario based calculation models for risk and pricing on a daily basis. Calculations can take from a few minutes to hours. When the implementation is finalized in March 2005, the bank plans to use Platform Symphony to speed up calculation times to increase output of accurate data on which to base strategic decisions. This will be done by grid-enabling the applications over a virtualized computing infrastructure which will deliver more flexibility and speed as well as increased cost savings. Peter Schwendner, Head of Quantitative Research at Sal. Oppenheim said, "On a daily basis, we strive to maintain our position as one of the leaders in the equity derivatives trading market. We anticipate that our grid solution will help us achieve this objective by handling the large quantities of data involved in pricing and risk calculation more effectively. Returning calculations with delays of even just seconds can result in the difference between profit and loss." In the financial services industry, managing market risk more effectively means that traders can make faster and more informed decisions. Financial institutions now have the ability to deploy software that will turbo charge complex, compute- and time-intensive applications across a virtualized infrastructure using existing IT infrastructure.