Sector: Finance and Energy

Reporting system

EMUN Partners is a Czech investment consulting company which gives advice about stock investment and provides annual reports of these investments to their end clients.

EMUN Partners is operating on the Czech investment market since 2011. Some of the products offered are private bank services, management of financial assets, preparation of the generational transfer of property, services for family businesses etc.

man holding black smartphone with flat screen monitor in front

A reporting system for EMUN Partners supports our customer in transition from manual MS Excel based reporting to an automated Java based solution. Our solution automatically downloads and extracts Excel based data from a client’s bank and generates various reports for their end clients.

Technologies: Java Swing, Apache POI and Apache Derby

Trading System

Eurex is one of the world’s leading derivatives exchanges offering a broad range of international benchmark products, operating the most liquid fixed income markets in the world and featuring open and low-cost electronic access.

Our company has been working on developing, testing and maintenance of the Eurex Trading System since 2006. During the time the system has been extended several times, starting with the version Eurex 10. Currently we are maintaining the system version Eurex 14.

black and silver laptop computer

The newest version of the system provides members with greater choice and enhanced flexibility in how they connect to the Eurex network through new interfaces, further clearing and risk management improvements as well as performance optimization.

Our team was responsible for functional testing for changed functionality of flexible options and futures. In the market risk management and data warehouse subsystems, changes of flexible options and futures were implemented and tested. In addition, existing restrictions of transaction and master data volumes were analyzed and extended according to the foreseen figures.

Technologies: OpenVMS, C/C++, Cobol, SQL, OpenVMS, Oracle RDB, DCL – Digital Command Language, TAFT, inter-process communication

M7 trading platform

Deutsche Börse Group is one of the largest exchange organizations worldwide. It is a provider of transaction services, an organizer for the trading of shares and other securities. It also gives companies and investors access to global capital markets.

Deutsche Börse Group operates several projects and covers several brands. One of them is 7 Market Technology. 7 Market Technology branding offers a variety of innovations in trade, clearing, risk management and connectivity. It consists of several infrastructures such as T7 – trading infrastructure, C7 – clearing infrastructure, N7 – global network, F7 – trading system and M7 – trading platform.

xitee team works on maintenance of M7. M7 is a trading platform for commodity markets which is used by wholesale brokers and exchanges to operate with futures and forwards. The M7 trading platform does trade mainly with gas, electricity and emissions markets and moreover, also with iron ore, oil, freight, pulp, paper, and fertilizers.

black transmission towers under green sky

Technologies: PostgreSQL, Java 8, Spring Hibernate, MyFaces

                                

SMARD Energy Platform

German electricity visualized and explained

SMARD – the electricity market data platform of the German Federal Network Agency – is online since 3 July 2017. The new transparency platform deciphers the German electricity system for all interested citizens. Easily comprehensible graphics visualizes the most important information regarding electricity in Germany – such as planned and actual production from the wind, solar or other sources, wholesale prices or national consumption. Background articles explain effects and correlations in an understandable language.                                    

The platform in detail

SMARD consists of four major areas: Electricity market news, Visualize market data, Overview of Germany, and Electricity market explained.

Electricity market news contains some news stories on selected trends of the German electricity market as a pillar of our supply chain. New articles are added constantly.

In the area Visualize market data, you can graphically plunge into different data categories, such as electricity production and consumption, electricity trading and system stability. One advantage: You are able to open different graphics in parallel in order to better comprehend correlations and to compare numbers. The data you see there comes from the platform of the European grid operators association ENTSO-E. First, they get checked whether they are correct and complete, then treated and conditioned, and finally published on SMARD. This process assures a correct data presentation near real time.

Overview of Germany renders data visible on a map of the German market area. This map allows a geographical overview of the power production landscape: Where are the most power plants, which energy sources dominate in which region? There is also information about the real-time electricity feed-in for power plants with more than 100 Megawatt per generating unit.

Electricity market explained is the contextualizing part of SMARD – and is a unique feature of the platform. Interested citizens can read intelligible background information about the functioning and the technical terms of the electricity market. This editorial accompaniment distinguishes SMARD from most existing pure data platforms.

A log-in area lets you personalize SMARD. Graphics created with SMARD can be stored here; in so doing, users can easily return later and find it again with just some clicks. Same applies to articles from the areas Electricity market news and Electricity market explained.

white windmill
A platform for the general public – and for experts

Germany’s electricity landscape is in full transformation. This change requires explanation – renewable energies are gaining in importance, networks are being expanded, and power plants are being decommissioned. People keep asking questions. SMARD fills this gap. It is addressed to the general public as well as to energy experts and analysts. People interested in the electricity market can dive deeply into the matter.

The website is developed by the digital experts of EWERK and xitee, two companies with profound knowledge from the energy and data sector. Both are a long-standing IT partners of several exchanges and energy suppliers in Germany and Europe. On behalf of the Federal Network Agency, the teams of both companies are now developing together a digital, interactive world of energy facts with a clear design and smooth data flows. The website will be further developed continuously.

Technologies: Java 1.8, Spring, Hibernate, Vaadin 7, RabbitMQ, Apache POI, TomCat, SQL, PostgreSQL, Power Shell, Windows Server

Cloudification

Introduction 

Cloud computing, simply put, is the delivery of computing services. That includes servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence over the Internet (“the cloud”) with a clear goal of enabling faster innovation, more flexible usage of resources and economies of scale. You typically pay only for the cloud services you use, which consequently helps to decrease operating costs, helps to run the infrastructure more efficiently, and scale according to the current needs of your business. Another benefit of cloud is low requirements for pre-investment (it is not necessary to invest in the purchase of HW at the beginning of the project, but it is spread over time).

We provide our customers with cloud consulting services, cloud infrastructure services, cloud application development and cloud application migration services. On top of that we are active in the field of IoT (Internet of Things).

Our cloud migration service can help you move towards digital business operations in the cloud. Migrating your in-house servers including services & applications running on them to the cloud can provide you with several cutting-edge advantages for your business. It is however very crucial to perform the transition properly and according to the specific requirements. As every business has different needs, we also follow a slightly different process for each individual cloud migration.With our cloud-native development, we help you to build and run applications that fully exploit all advantages of the cloud computing model. Our cloud-native computing service uses: open-source software stack to be containerized, dynamically orchestrated and microservices-oriented.

Cloud consulting

Adoption of cloud computing can help you to reduce operational expenses, boost innovation, unlock new possibilities, and realize your strategic IT objectives.

Our cloud consulting service starts with understanding of your current technology landscape, business challenges and goals. We know that our clients have unique needs and are at different levels of maturity on their cloud journey. Therefore we are providing a tailored set of cloud consulting services which support you through your decision-making process and help you to accomplish your business objectives.

Based on the level of the cloud adaption in your company, we can provide following expertise:

Cloud adaption: we ensure that your first steps into public cloud are efficient, smooth and secure. Our experts will help you build a resilient cloud platform.

Migration Assessment: The destination platform could be a public or private cloud infrastructure. We help you to assess the suitability of on-premises machines for migration to cloud. We provide you with correct sizing of VMs (virtual machines) and cost estimates for running infrastructure.

Cloud Optimization: We analyze your cloud infrastructure, detect under- and over-provisioned instances and idle resources, and identify security gaps to remove performance bottlenecks and lower your cloud computing costs.

Cloud strategy: It’s no longer about looking at one application or a specific part of the business, but how to transform your whole company, help it to to develop faster and be more efficient than the competition.

Cloud migration

Our cloud migration service can help you move towards digital business operations in the cloud. Migrating your in-house servers including services & applications running on them to the cloud can provide you with several cutting-edge advantages for your business. It is however very crucial to perform the transition properly and according to the specific requirements. As every business has different needs, we also follow a slightly different process for each individual cloud migration.

Before the cloud migration begins, it is important to establish its goals. The migration goals are individual for every company. For one company it could be an increase of the performance of an application or enabling new services. Other company might expect cost savings or relieving the IT department from application support duties.

The other important concern when establishing cloud migration goals is to agree when the old infrastructure has to be terminated.

After migration goals are agreed on, the company focuses on creating a security strategy. The ultimate objectives for a security of the organization don’t change with the introduction/implementation of cloud services, but the way how those objectives will be achieved is going to be modified. Security teams must still focus on reducing business risk from attacks and focus on getting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability assurances built into all information systems and data. Cloud cybersecurity requires a different approach compared to the on-premises security. In the cloud environment, corporate assets are no longer protected by an on-premise firewall, and the network perimeter basically does not exist.

When a company becomes confident with security assurances, it is time to choose a suitable cloud provider and to copy the data over. This should be done continually throughout the migration process so that the cloud data remains up-to-date. There are many tools which support migration of complete servers as well as the individual databases.

The most complex part of the process is then moving the company application including their business intelligence. This part might involve refactoring or rewriting the code.

After a proper testing and verification, the last step of the process is to switch the production from on-premise to the cloud.

Cloud-native development

With our cloud-native development, we help you to build and run applications that fully exploit all advantages of the cloud computing model

Our cloud native computing uses an open-source software stack to be:

  • Containerized: every part (applications, processes, etc.) is packaged in its separate container. This eases the reproducibility, transparency, and resource isolation.
  • Dynamically orchestrated: containers are actively scheduled and managed to optimize resource utilization.
  • Microservices-oriented: segmentation of the applications into microservices, which greatly increases the overall agility and maintainability of applications.

Among the main advantages of cloud native development belong: 

  • avoiding high initial costs with pay-as-you-go model. No initial infrastructure investment needed
  • reducing the time-to-market with optimized infrastructure setup, CI/CD delivery & deployment
  • innovative technology – cloud application platforms are exposed to the latest technology, such as big data, AI (artificial intelligence), IoT (Internet of Things), etc.
  • global scale – ability to scale elastically according to the needs. Start small but be ready to grow big
  • ensuring high availability & reliability – cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery and business continuity easier and less expensive

The main challenges for organizations connected to the cloud native development are:

  • optimization of the infrastructure costs
  • selection of the perfect technology cloud set-up
  •  the need of building of DevOps culture

Atlassian products in xitee

xitee has had a rich experience with Atlassian products since 2007. Atlassian products (especially Jira and Confluence as well as Plugin`s) are key systems for xitee and cover all processes in many areas – it is not only Software development or Service management, but also the HR management and ISO management including internal documentation. All Atlassian products that we use are completely and directly managed by xitee IT Operations (hosting, installation, configuration, customization, monitoring, …). IT Operations is a crucial part of xitee. A team of 8 highly qualified people covers almost all areas of IT Operations, and nursing of Atlassian ecosystem is one them.

List of Atlassian application what we use (sizing included)

  • Jira Software + Core (more than 70 projects, 20 000+ issues)
  • Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk)
  • Confluence (60 spaces, 3 000 pages)
  • Bitbucket (50 repositories)
  • Bamboo (80 jobs)

We have been continuously improving our Atlassian stack using plugins, custom settings including custom workflows, issue types, screens, notification schemes, user macros etc. We are also using automation within Jira – for example custom parser of emails to extract the information and fill in into issue fields. In total we use around 15 plugins – the following are the major ones with highest added value for xitee:

  • Tempo Timesheets-Time Tracking & Reports for JIRA
  • Time to SLA for JIRA (more possibilities for SLA tracking)
  • Zephyr Scale – Test Management for Jira
  • ScriptRunner for Jira and Confluence (automation)
  • Reminder for Jira – Follow Up Issues
  • Table Filter and Charts for Confluence

We have experience with retrieving information from the Jira database to MS Excel and with direct interaction with Jira via api.

Kanban board of development project

Part of complex workflow

Intranet in Confluence (was realized without any expensive plugin)

FinTech solutions

Synergy of finance & technology gives us a fair clue intothe topic of this rapidly growing industry. FinTech mainly focuses on business, which uses technological advances to boost or automate processes in financial services. It ranges from investment applications and mobile banking to insurance and cryptocurrency.

FinTech has grown rapidly over the past few years due to massive increase in the internet and especially smartphone usage. However, it is not limited only in this area since FinTech has been firstly implemented in the commercial sphere – introduction of ATM’s, credit cards followed by automated & high-frequency trading.

Uses of the FinTech is in the world of finance almost endless. Main drivers are innovative start-ups that push the innovation level over the edge. Therefore, traditional banking institutions must adapt rapidly to the ever changing FinTech environment. An interesting area is the combination of trading with AI & Machine Learning, where the ability to predict market movements is invaluable.

Working in financial markets is connected to some specifics such as:

  • Trading systems must process huge amounts of messages during market peak times. That requires a complex system architecture extensively optimized for high throughput and low latency. Such a peak may reach magnitude of hundred thousand messages per second with latency measured in milliseconds.
  • Frequent need for a system integration via bridge applications connecting existing systems without need to change them. Building new system interfaces. Typical example are FIX (Financial Information eXchange) protocol converters.
  • High Availability system design for mission critical systems. Robust system design with redundant parts (no single-point-of-failure) and a real-time system health monitoring allows high system availability reaching or exceeding 99.99%. It can be also combined with 24/7 operation mode (without any service batch). Several systems we developed or maintain are considered as a critical infrastructure in Germany, Austria, and other countries.

xitee has a profound experience in working for leading European stock exchanges and FinTech companies. For more information, see our projects.

CFD Trading Platform

FinTech Group AG is an innovator and established market leader in the German online brokerage market which has been operating at the German market since 1999. FinTech Group has extensive experience in providing technology solutions for financial services providers and it is an important technology partner for German and international banks, and financial institutions in the B2B segment.

Our team was responsible for the development and maintenance of a new trading platform – CFD Trading Platform.

man sitting in front of the MacBook Pro

CFD (Contact for Difference) Trading Platform was developed as an independent trading platform for financial derivatives. The system gets data about underlying assets from different markets and then provides trading for end investors both as a desktop and a mobile application.

It is a completely new internet based trading platform which was built from scratch. Our team was responsible for the whole technical design, development and selection of technologies. We also afterwards participated in production maintenance and development of new system releases.

The CFD Trading Platform was designed as a B2B platform which consists of front-end, back-end, back office with external communication using FIX protocol and security certificates. We also developed a mobile version of the system – an iPhone interface of CFD Trading Platform in an Objective-C programming language.

Technologies: Weblogic, JBoss, Oracle, PostgreSQL/EnterpriseDB, Java, EJB, PL/SQL

Cloud computing

Cloud computing, simply put, is the delivery of computing services. That includes servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence over the Internet (“the cloud”) with a clear goal of enabling faster innovation, more flexible usage of resources and economies of scale. You typically pay only for the cloud services you use, which consequently helps to decrease operating costs, helps to run the infrastructure more efficiently, and scale according to the current needs of your business.

There are three main service models of cloud computing – often visualized in a pyramid where each level of the service model is more specialized than the one before, but it is built on the same basic structure. The one at the bottom (IaaS) is more versatile and customizable fitting to many applications, the one at the top (SaaS) is more specialized and fitting to specific tasks.

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)  is similar to traditional computer hardware (servers, networks, operating systems), but instead of buying the physical hardware, company can purchase the infrastructure as a virtual service through an IaaS provider. These resources are usually easy to scale and offer the customer a complete control over the infrastructure. Examples of IaaS include Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine.
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) stands for a platform allowing companies to develop, run, and manage solutions without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure that is typically connected with developing and launching an app. Developers can therefore focus on the software without having to manage operating systems, software updates, and other infrastructure matters. PaaS examples include Microsoft Azure, the Google App Engine.
  • Software as a Service (SaaS) represents a complete software solution which you purchase on a pay-as-you-go basis from a cloud service provider. Put simply, you rent the use of the particular solution for your organization. Instead of having to install the solution, the users can connect to it over the Internet, usually with a web browser. All of the underlying infrastructure, middleware, app software, and app data are located in the service provider’s data center. The service provider manages the hardware and software, and ensures the availability and security of the app and your data. Examples of SaaS include Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite.

Today, the basic division is often enhanced by a fourth dimension – FaaS, going even more specific.

  • Function as a Service (FaaS) allows customers to execute code responsively without having to allocate processing resources ahead of time.  It enables the customers to develop, to run and to manage application functionalities without the need to build and maintain complex infrastructures. This way of app development is often used when building microservices applications and it enables the achievement of the so-called serverless architecture. FaaS examples are AWS Lambdas, Azure Functions.

Another way to divide cloud computing is based on the deployment model.

Cloud deployment describes where the infrastructure for the deployment is hosted and who has access and control to it. There are four deployment models:

  • Private cloud – an exclusive cloud for the organization, can be on-premise but also off premise
  • Public cloud – cloud infrastructure is available to the general public and it is owned by the company selling cloud services
  • Community cloud – the cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns
  • Hybrid cloud – the cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community, or public)

This division of clouds defines also the deployment strategy used.

We provide our customers with cloud consulting services, cloud infrastructure services, cloud application development and cloud application migration services. On top of that we are active in the field of IoT (Internet of Things).

Our cloud migration service can help you move towards digital business operations in the cloud. Migrating your in-house servers including services & applications running on them to the cloud can provide you with several cutting-edge advantages for your business. It is however very crucial to perform the transition properly and according to the specific requirements. As every business has different needs, we also follow a slightly different process for each individual cloud migration. With our cloud-native development, we help you to build and run applications that fully exploit all advantages of the cloud computing model. Our cloud-native computing service uses: open-source software stack to be containerized, dynamically orchestrated and microservices-oriented.