Deep Blue Capital Selects AdaCore Products for Financial System Development

Reliable Ada software gives trading firm a competitive edge

NEW YORK and PARIS, January 22, 2014 – AdaCore today announced the adoption of its GNAT Pro Ada Development Environment by Deep Blue Capital (DBC), a propriety trading firm. DBC rotates teams through the world time zones at their Amsterdam-based offices to trade twenty-four hours a day on all of the world’s major stock exchanges. DBC employs algorithmic trading systems developed in Ada with AdaCore’s GNAT Pro development environment; these systems gather market information and automatically send buy and sell orders with minimal human intervention. DBC, a small company with fewer than twenty employees, can operate globally because of its efficient and reliable software.

The Ada language and AdaCore’s GNAT Pro development environment help DBC’s developers create systems that can easily and reliably handle the huge influx of price data they receive and the large number of daily financial operations. Their business requires their computers to run continuously, and DBC’s use of Ada means that their transaction system is immune to issues like integer overflow that plague systems developed in other languages.

The automated trading system contains more than 1 million lines of code written almost entirely in Ada. It must handle 40,000 price updates a second at the same time as smoothly managing DBC’s 10,000 daily transactions, all while remaining perfectly dependable. These volumes and the ceaseless invention of new trading strategies by DBC’s researchers requires systems that are easily updatable and adaptable to new technologies. The Ada programming language offers developers a high degree of control so they can create systems capable of handling a large number of operations. As Ada detects many kinds of errors at compile time rather than run time, mistakes are detected and corrected early. This reduces debugging costs.

According to DBC Chief Technology Officer Duncan Sands, creating reliable and efficient software is vital to his company’s ability to compete with much larger financial institutions. "Given the fact that we are a small company with limited resources, using Ada with GNAT Pro allows us to create the software we need to compete with the systems of much bigger financial companies,” Sands explains. “Our efficiency in controlling the costs of writing reliable software is crucial for our business performance. We just do not have the luxury of spending days tracking down programming errors through heavy debugging sessions. Combined with the fact that our development team's speciality is finance and not software engineering, that our code base exceeds one million lines and that our software up-time requirement is 24 hours a day, selecting Ada was the obvious choice."

About GNAT Pro
GNAT Pro is a robust and flexible Ada development environment. It includes professional grade tools, unmatched product support and expert Ada advice designed to allow development teams to take full advantage of the benefits Ada offers, and ensure a smooth, cost-effective development process.

About AdaCore
Founded in 1994, AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial software solutions for Ada, a state-of-the-art programming language designed for large, long-lived applications where safety, security, and reliability are critical. AdaCore's flagship product is the open source GNAT Pro development environment, which comes with expert on-line support and is available on more platforms than any other Ada technology. AdaCore has an extensive world-wide customer base; see http://www.adacore.com/home/company/customers/ for further information.

Ada and GNAT Pro are seeing a growing usage in high-integrity and safety-certified applications, including space-based systems, commercial aircraft avionics, military systems, air traffic management/control, railroad systems, and medical devices, and in security-sensitive domains, such as financial services. The SPARK Pro toolset, available from AdaCore, is especially useful in such contexts.

AdaCore has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. http://www.adacore.com

About Deep Blue Capital
Deep Blue Capital is a dynamic propriety trading firm with a strong quantitative approach that provides liquidity to all of the world’s major equity exchanges. Underlying its trading systems are dynamic strategies that ensure positive economic returns. The DBC team consists of 16 multi-cultural professionals with specialized expertise in quantitative finance. The company was formed in 2008 and is based in Amsterdam.

http://www.deepbluecap.com

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Jamie Ayre
AdaCore
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Jessie Glockner
Rainier Communications (for AdaCore)
Tel: 508-475-0025 x140
adacore@rainierco.com
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