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abFutures, Ltd. - Auckland, New Zealand
Collaborative Decision Making using Excel
Allan Barrow, Managing Director of abFutures, Ltd. was looking for a way to build a more effective work environment for his team of money market traders when setting up a new office in Auckland, New Zealand. The goal was to provide a team of five traders with real-time analysis results being generated on an Excel server. The Excel applications on the server were receiving live market data from an outside information feed over the Internet. Real-time performance was another requirement, which necessitated the purchase of high-end 64 bit Windows servers and Windows XP based workstations.
An Internet search turns up the answer
After studying the problem of how to get live data out of his Excel server applications and into the workstations spreadsheets, Allan decided to hire a programmer and they attempted to use DCOM as the transport layer between his networked applications. Unfortunately, this approach just kept running into a series of frustrating technology problems and that's when Allan turned to Google in the hope of finding an answer.
 Cascade DataHub shares Excel data, quickly and easily
Allan's search results pointed him at Cogent's web site. A short time later, he downloaded the demo version of the Cascade DataHub and Cascade Connect* programs. Not long after that we got a phone call from Allan who had a couple of questions, which were easily answered and he was soon testing the software with money market data from the European and US exchanges.
The solution was simple
In the end Allan installed the Cascade DataHub on his Excel Server and configured his spreadsheet to send data to the DataHub whenever analysis results were calculated. On each of the workstations, Cascade Connect was installed and configured to connect to the DataHub. Whenever new data arrived at the DataHub, it was immediately sent to the Cascade Connect programs using the standard TCP/IP network protocol.
On the workstation side, getting the data out of Cascade Connect and into Excel was as simple as dragging and dropping the point name into the appropriate location in the spreadsheet.
abFutures, Ltd. are now running a collaborative network where real-time Excel analysis results are shared between multiple traders. The software solution is fast, robust and was easy to install and operate.
 Read the customer testimonial here
* Note: Since this application was finished, the Cascade Connect program has been superceded by the new version of the Cascade DataHub. In the diagram above, the new DataHub would be installed on both the server and workstation computers.
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