With the rapid changes taking place in the Capital Markets, the top consultants have identified a need for participants in these markets to implement Change Enabled Environments.

This type of environment must be extremely flexible to respond to market changes:

• new products
• new market structures
• changing processing standards

And to be able to respond to new operational needs and adapt to:

• Mergers
• Regulation
• Risk

The RTE architecture has been developed by Compaq to support all organizations in implementing infrastructure solutions that allow the realization of the Real-Time Enterprise (RTE) model while at the same time utilizing existing investments in IT systems and application software.

It is of particular relevance to change enabling the operations of capital market participants.

What is RTE?
RTE is a two-layered architecture including a pre-defined and pre-integrated set of industry standard tools and applications.

The first layer, the Application Integration Layer, consists of a set of tools that support:

• message routing
• business rules
• data transformation

The second layer, the Operational Data Store (ODS), consists of a high performance, real-time data store. This is hosted by a high performance, Tru-64 UNIX Cluster and an Oracle database with Compaq’s unique Real-Time ODS manager software and schema design. At the database level Oracle’s 9iRAC on Compaq product provides the dynamic extensibility, high availability and management features necessary to ensure enterprise scalability and reliability at reasonable cost.

The Application Integration layer links existing systems and infrastructures replicating transactions on the ODS.

The ODS not only acts as a real-time source of information, but also acts as a platform to provide further functionality as required including predefined applications for:

• web portals for order capture & information services
• wireless integration
• STP Monitoring
• MIS/EIS
• risk management
• compliance
• treasury

The RTE structure also allows the implementation of compound applications made up of functionality from several disparate systems to quickly meet changing business needs.

Lower Risk – Business Continuity
A key benefit of the RTE architecture and structured implementation is business continuity.

There is no requirement to change existing systems or infrastructures to implement a RTE solution.

The Application Integration Layer provides the tools and applications to connect to the existing systems and feed the ODS without affecting day-to-day operations.

Following implementation, the RTE operational infrastructure can be enhanced to improve the performance of existing systems and also acts as a platform to facilitate application migration.