Customer Story
Tel Aviv Stock Exchange: Modernizing a stock exchange
Meet the Customer:
The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) provides investors with a reliable and comprehensive trading platform for a wide range of securities and financial instruments, including shares, bonds, Treasury bills, ETFs, options, and futures on equity indices and foreign currency exchange rates.
Outcomes
- Lower costs and minimized risks
- Compliance with international standards, security, and regulations
- Ability to develop in other languages and models, improved version management
- Better developer experience
Solutions
TASE’s clearing and settlement system is based on Adabas & Natural, but was moved to Linux, where its trading system resides. It also moved to NaturalONE so that programmers could access the latest tools for agile development and deployment.
Embracing the new, leveraging the old
The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE), Israel’s only exchange, understands competition. It competes for market share with digital-first fintech firms and some of the world’s largest, most powerful exchanges. And as Israel is the second-largest hub for high-tech startups (next to Silicon Valley), TASE must also compete for IPOs. To do this, the exchange had to modernize its technology.
TASE needed to offer digital services on par with those of new FinTech firms while adhering to local and global regulations. It also needed to provide services that compete with the larger first-tier exchanges like Nasdaq®, LSE, and NYSE.
Its first project was to move its clearing and settlement system, based on Adabas & Natural, to Linux, where its trading system resides. The Linux operating system is less expensive to operate and maintain and, as an open source platform, provides TASE with a wider selection of development and versioning tools.
With the help of Software AG, TASE seamlessly rehosted more than 10,000 Natural programs and Adabas databases that processed more than 300,000 clearing and settlement transactions per day from its legacy environment to Linux. This move reduced costs and minimized risks while keeping the advantages of its tailor-made, mission-critical applications and back-end data.
DevOps for all
For the next phase, TASE wanted to bring all its programmers together under one DevOps-based architecture. Software AG’s Eclipse-based development environment, NaturalONE, integrated easily with the DevOps environment already being used by TASE’s Java®, C++, and Python® programmers.
Now, the development of new applications and enhancements to existing ones is guided by the same DevOps standards and procedures, regardless of programming language or model.
The move to NaturalONE and DevOps also ensured programmers had access to the latest state-of-the-art tools for agile development and deployment. For example, the ability to control the development environment with open-source version control systems such as Git is proving invaluable for meeting regulatory requirements.
Regulatory requirements—local and global—meant that TASE needed versioning control for critical systems. TASE produces indexes in which calculations change continually, depending on new securities and payment events. Version control is paramount so that regulators can see what changes were made and when.
Improved version management means less effort for programmers, greater control over changes, and quicker, more agile development.
Prior to the introduction of NaturalONE, programmers lacked easy-to-use tools to merge and evaluate changes made by different programmers working on the same piece of code.
Relying on manual scans to identify applicable changes was time-consuming and risky.
With the introduction of NaturalONE, TASE is already seeing improved programmer productivity. Developers can now use the Git repository-based version control system to merge duplicate changes when several developers work on the same source code. This is easy to do by comparing the two versions on one screen and approving each required change.
Version control with NaturalONE is very powerful—since all versions of the source code are kept in the repository, changes can be moved forward or rolled back. The ability to reactivate older source code reduces risks and improves developer productivity.
What’s next?
With all of its applications and data now on Linux, TASE’s next step will be to implement a cloud architecture by using virtualization to separate the database server from the application server. This will ensure better control over each server by avoiding dependence on a single physical machine. “We want to ensure better business continuity and security and higher availability in an architecture that allows the application and database to run on different servers,” said Hezi Shirazi of the System Architecture Back Office.
TASE plans to use virtualization—a technique that splits the Natural application into services that can run in Docker® containers—to separate the data from the application and place each on a different server. With load balancing, TASE will be prepared to handle system outages with quicker, easier recovery—ensuring business continuity if a server goes down.
Open systems, open minds
When TASE rehosted its Adabas & Natural application to open-source Linux, its Natural developers were initially reluctant to start working in the new Eclipse-based NaturalONE environment now available to them. Wary about using modern tools, the TASE programmers needed convincing.
Software AG provided on-site training and mentoring for NaturalONE. Within just a few days of demonstrating how NaturalONE could work in the integrated DevOps environment, the programmers’ reluctance dissipated.
“After seeing all the bells and whistles of using NaturalONE with DevOps tools like Git and Jira®, the developers were astounded at how much easier it would be for them to develop better program code, faster and more securely,” noted Ilan Hirschowitz, the Software AG Solutions Engineer who led on-site workshops.
And, there was a bonus: The new development architecture brought all of TASE’s development teams together. From clearing to derivatives, the various specialty teams and business stakeholders now know each other, work together, and understand the importance of what each team—and the exchange—is doing.
TASE is now equipped to face the strongest competitors with agility and speed, thanks to a smart move to Linux and adoption of NaturalONE in an Eclipse-based DevOps environment.
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