Charles River combines innovative technology that is scalable, open, and robust (for example, Java, Microsoft® .NET, and Web services), with industry-standard technology to produce products that are easy to implement and integrate with other systems. The Charles River Investment Management System (Charles River IMS) incorporates a modern n-tier service-oriented architecture (SOA) to support the front- and middle-office needs of global financial organizations. The system provides a highly scalable, distributed architecture for continuous 24 X 7 operations.
Charles River also employs technology that improves usability and performance. The use of Java and Microsoft .NET illustrates Charles River's commitment to keeping the system current with leading-edge technology—both the software and financial industry are investing heavily in these two development frameworks. Leveraging Java's platform independence, Charles River can support a wide range of computing environments. The J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) environment provides platform independent server-side business processing and the performance and scalability needed for high performance financial applications. Charles River clients recognize additional benefits from J2EE, as it is the industry standard for larger, scalable, enterprise applications.
Charles River uses Microsoft .NET and C# for development of the front-end graphical user interface (GUI). Not only does .NET leverage the firm's development expertise (providing numerous ongoing efficiencies)—C# tightly integrates with Web services and allows for fluid integration.
Architectural Highlights
- Microsoft .NET front-end using C#
- Java middle tier, with embedded application server
- Oracle®, Microsoft SQL Server™, or Sybase® databases
- XML Messaging and Web services over SOAP
- Web reporting
- WAN-enabled
- Open Integration Framework options
Architectural Advantages
- Highly scalable and proven in large, multi-site global deployments
- Fully threaded for performance on multi-CPU machines
- Pre-staged data structure architecture provides fastest pre-trade compliance and group / complex-wide testing
- Standardization of best-of-breed technologies to provide extensible applications