The system was also able to load five million deals in a portfolio in less than seven minutes.

The tests were conducted using Sun's Fire 6800, 12CPUS and 48Go systems.

Tests conducted at the head office of HVB Group - a Sophis client - were also "very satisfactory", says the vendor.

Sophis says the results demonstrate that Risque can support large volume-based trading environments with instrument types ranging from listed-market securities to exotic products.

Hervé Vinciguerra, chairman, Sophis, comments: "In 2000, Sophis started to work on scalability issues. We opted for n-Tier and Corba architecture, compartmentalising functional units of a system and linking them through the Corba-based communication layer.

"The test results show that today, the set of Corba services we have developed produce cumulative results, which increase dramatically the overall performance of our system."