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Delphi DocumentationSupport |
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 DELPHI CASE STUDY
TRIPLE POINT TECHNOLOGY, INC.
 Tool — Delphi Client/Server and MIDASIndustry — Commodity TradingApplication — Tempest Energy Trading SystemDatabase Server — SybaseOVERVIEW • Triple Point Technology was doing UNIX-platform software development for the commodities trading industry and decided to market a Windows energy-trading application with a Sybase backend database. • Evaluating development tools to build the comprehensive application, Triple Point considered Visual Basic and Visual C++, but finally selected Borland Delphi for its speed and database handling capability. • The resulting application, Tempest 2000, triples traders' per-transaction productivity, leveraging their ability to process higher volumes of transactions required in volatile markets. • Triple Point also built upon the Tempest 2000 system to build Franklin, an electricity-trading system to enable companies to enter the emerging field of power trading in a deregulated market. • An add-on application, Outpost, incorporates features enabled by Borland MIDAS that allow anyone with access to the corporate intranet to read and electronically store trading reports. RETURN ON INVESTMENT • Delphi RAD capability and its rich palette of built-in data-handling components enabled fast development without having to build numerous custom components. • Delphi enabled Triple Point to build business objects, use data modules, and fully exploit form inheritance, taking maximum advantage of object-oriented technology for speed and power. • Using Delphi, Triple Point completed Tempest 2000 a full year sooner than they could have using Visual C++, enabling the earliest possible entry into a growing market. • The exhaustively comprehensive Delphi-built system gives Triple Point a strong edge over less powerful systems built by commercial competitors or by internal IS departments. • With Delphi speed and data access capability, Tempest improves trade-cycle productivity threefold over typical spreadsheet/general-ledger systems. COMPANY BACKGROUND Triple Point Technology, Inc. provides comprehensive, integrated commodities trading solutions to major oil companies, investment banks, shipping concerns, energy companies, and other global trading organizations. Founded in 1993, the company is headquartered in Westport, CT, with satellite offices in Houston, TX, and Geneva, Switzerland. Triple Point clients include such leading worldwide organizations as Mobil Supply & Trading, Koch Industries, Morgan Stanley & Co., Société Générale Enérgie, Petronas, and Glencore Ltd. SITUATION Triple Point Technology, Inc., which had been doing UNIX-platform software development work for the commodities trading industry, made a strategic decision to build a totally new Windows-based trading system for crude oil, refined product, fuel oil, and petrochemical trading businesses. The company started design work on a large-scale client/server application aimed at organizations such as banks, energy companies, and other companies buying and selling energy commodities. In selecting a development tool, system architects first considered Visual Basic, but found it unsuitable for a system of the size and complexity they planned. They evaluated Visual C++, but found it could not be used to build an application incorporating both multiple document and single document interfaces in the same application. Finally, they tried Delphi, which had just become available. Initial test applications were successful, so they selected Delphi to build the first 16-bit version of the Tempest Energy Trading System. Encouraged by a half-dozen successful large system implementations, Triple Point decided to port Tempest to a full 32-bit system, incorporating many system enhancements at the same time. Developers accomplished the system rework in five months and released Tempest 2000 in November 1996. Triple Point identified electricity as an up-and-coming commodities trading vehicle and set out to build an OLAP system for electricity traders based on Tempest 2000. That system, Franklin, was released in mid-1997 for marketing to companies doing large scale bulk trading of electricity—producers, power marketers (firms without production capability who buy and sell electricity), banks, and Wall Street firms trading electricity in speculative derivatives. The range of clientele for Franklin is similar to that for the Tempest 2000 System itself, running the gamut from producers to traders, speculative traders, and consumers. SOLUTION What differentiates the commodities market from the equities market is that physical products must be moved from point to point. Buyers and sellers must arrange for transmission, measuring the product at the point of origin and again at the destination. Volumes may vary. A buyer may contract for 500,000 barrels of crude oil, but the seller may only ship 488,000 barrels. There may be loss or shrinkage in transit. There may be variability in the specification; and the actual price may be based on that variability. Some delivery terms may specify that the purchaser owns the product as soon as it leaves the seller's site, while other sale terms may require that the seller guarantee delivery through the transmission. The purpose of the Tempest 2000 and Franklin systems is to centralize all the processing and information necessary to track both physical trades and the hedging and speculative paper trading operations that go with them—futures, swaps, and other derivatives—and to track an integrated bottom line profit/loss for the entire trading operation at the same time. For example, it's rare that a trader just buys or sells a block of electricity. The block will probably be bought and sold with pricing determined by market conditions in the future, e.g., the average price on the Nymex during some future month. At risk to the Nymex market for that amount of electricity, the trader hedges the risk position by buying or selling futures on the Nymex. Each physical transaction is associated with a complex set of paper transactions attempting to lock in a known profit and loss from the outset. The risk has to be managed until final settlement of the trade. With a product with a lot of volatility, like crude oil, some unforeseen event could significantly drive the price up or down, so a trader must monitor and manage, on a daily basis, deals that have already been made in order to guarantee that a positive profit-and-loss is maintained. With Tempest 2000 and Franklin, traders don't have to worry about complex calculations. They just key in deals. Tempest accurately tracks the profit and loss status of their positions, so traders and trading organization can focus on the bigger issues: Which way is the market actually going? What's our total risk to the marketplace? What trades can we make to mitigate that risk if the market moves way up or down? Many times, commodities organizations are so overwhelmed by the paperwork and effort that goes into processing even the most basic transactions, that they lose sight of this bigger picture. Tempest 2000 and Franklin tap Delphi speed and data access to provide off-the-shelf technology that a trading company can put to immediate use to manage its business. Compared to the typical situation, where a company is using either a combination of ad hoc systems or a spreadsheet combined with a general ledger accounting system, Tempest 2000 can triple productivity on a per-transaction basis. In a sudden high-volatility situation increasing transaction loads by a factor of ten, a company will be less likely to be caught without enough people to handle the business. Triple Point's Delphi-powered systems are able to leverage people power to process a significantly higher volume of transactions. A recently released add-on module posts reports generated by Tempest to a repository where they can be viewed by anyone on the corporate intranet. The new module, Outpost, was built using the MIDAS Remote Databroker. A Delphi-built ActiveX control in the browser calls the MIDAS server, which in turn calls the database, fetches the report, and passes it back to the browser. This thin-client application enables a company to distribute reports widely throughout the organization, yet not require full Tempest systems to be installed on everyone's desktop. Outpost also provides an electronic filing cabinet in which individual users can maintain a paperless file of reports for historical review. TECHNOLOGY
DEVELOPMENT
CUSTOMER COMMENTS "I have been very, very pleased with our decision to go with Delphi to create TEMPEST 2000 and FRANKLIN. I believe we would be at least a year behind where we are if we had stayed with Visual C++. In addition, for our new OUTPOST add-on, MIDAS gave us the perfect way to build thin clients for distributing reports over the intranet."
—Allie Rogers, Director of Technology, PARTNER CONTACT Visit Triple Point's Web site at www.tpt.com.
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