SimCorp
SimCorp was founded in 1971 and is headquartered in Denmark. SimCorp operates subsidiary companies throughout Scandinavia as well as in Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Australia and the USA.
SimCorp is one of Europe's leading suppliers of highly specialised software and financial know-how for the financial sector and corporate treasuries.
The SimCorp systems, SimCorp Dimension and IT/2 are sold, implemented and supported by the head office in Copenhagen and subsidiaries. SimCorp develops and globally markets integrated investments and treasury management systems. The products help customers perform all tasks needed to stay ahead in today's international financial markets. SimCorp is recognised as a major global provider of comprehensive software solutions and associated financial knowledge and as a company where professionals are proud to work. SimCorp has approximately 540 employees and is listed on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange. SimCorp has an R&D Department of more than 150 people on its main product, SimCorp Dimension (which is developed primarily with Dyalog).
SimCorp's investment management system, SimCorp Dimension, is designed for financial institutions with management of financial assets and liabilities as their core activity. With SimCorp Dimension, SimCorp delivers an integrated, complete system solution for professional management and administration of financial investments.
SimCorp Dimension handles a very broad range of financial instruments and offers comprehensive and flexible functionality for front office analysis and investment activities, middle office risk management and performance reporting and back office settlement and bookkeeping.
The system, which is available in both English and German versions, supports multi-national operations and interfaces with a number of external systems and databases such as price information and payment transfer systems. Flexibility, user-friendly design and the ability to manage a broad scope of securities and financial instruments help guarantee SimCorp Dimension's effectiveness far into the future. More than 100 financial institutions in 10 countries have chosen SimCorp Dimension.
The SimCorp Dimension system has grown to be a really huge system. A few key size figures on version 3.3 illustrate this:
- 139 MB = 690,000 lines of APL code (excluding comment lines and blank lines)
- 20 MB of C-coded executables and DLL libraries
- 1,800 database tables containing 20,000 fields and having almost 4,800 Oracle Stored Procedures
- 2,100 defined screen forms having 24,000 fields on them.
A new version of the system is released twice a year. With each new release the system grows approximately 10%, adding approximately 60,000 lines of APL code. Each release requires more than 1,500 pages of specifications.
Of the 150 people employed in the SimCorp Dimension Development Department, approximately 70 are full-time APL programmers.
SimCorp Dimension is a mission-critical system.
Why does SimCorp use Dyalog?
SimCorp has a long history of using APL from Dyalog Ltd, and the choice of Dyalog as the primary development platform for SimCorp Dimension was really an easy one. Dyalog Ltd was – and still is – far ahead of other APL vendors supplying Microsoft-based development environments. The Dyalog system is very well integrated with the Microsoft Windows environment and Dyalog Ltd's ability to support new versions of Microsoft Windows is impressive.
The nature of Dyalog really enables us to focus on solving the business requirements instead of writing huge amounts of source code. Programming very complex, professional-looking, state-of-the art user interfaces is probably easier in Dyalog than in most other languages due to the very intuitive implementation.
The APL language dialect implemented in Dyalog is very sound. It has good performance, and many language enhancements have been implemented. To our satisfaction, Dyalog Ltd focuses on real improvements rather than just implementing "smart features" that look good in sales brochures.
Dyalog is very open for interfacing through almost all modern industry standards, for example, DDE, OLE, DLL, COM and TCP/IP. This really gives us the opportunity to select the best technology for a given task, while at the same time retaining all the benefits from being inside a Dyalog development environment.
The people in the team behind Dyalog are very skilled, and they always act very professionally. This is why we consider Dyalog Ltd to be an excellent partner.
We welcome Dyalog Ltd's initiatives towards the Microsoft .NET framework, and we will support them to the best of our abilities in their future work.
Dyalog has a large number of advantages, compared to other APL vendors. The most important advantages, seen from our point of view, are:
- Excellent stability and a high quality product
- GUI interface is easy to use and very stable
- Many GUI object types
- Very productive tracer and debugger tool
- Openness – plenty of good interface possibilities
- Control structures are as sent from Heaven
- Use of references instead of moving large amounts of data
- Small overhead for function calling
- Some nice "productivity functions" (union, intersection, ⎕DR, Mix, etc.)
- Strand assignment
- Syntax colouring in the editor
- Last but not least: the team behind the product