"We are extremely pleased with Coral8 Engine's agility and flexibility, as well as the responsiveness of Coral8's engineering organization and technical support team," said Dan Zulu, head of IT at Nedbank Capital. "During the evaluation period, we developed and deployed in just three months an initial set of market-making applications based on Coral8's CEP platform. Our next step is migrating existing strategies and algorithms from our legacy arbitrage and basket trading applications to the new architecture. This daunting task would typically take five man-years to complete but can be done in approximately three months on Coral8's platform. The new CEP infrastructure reinforces our customer-centric business model, allowing us to provide a superior customer experience by delivering more new products more often."

Nedbank Capital evaluated many US- and UK-based CEP vendors to address a number of business challenges. For instance, having to custom code applications led to costly, long development cycles and slowed time-to-market of new services. Also, Nedbank Capital lacked a shared infrastructure for responding to evolving market dynamics and needed to address the stovepipe applications that were costly to maintain. Finally, limited availability of programmers skilled in both programming and industry-domain knowledge in South Africa made it difficult to staff projects.

Nedbank Capital clearly needed a new platform that would support the development of next-generation market-making applications and the bank's expansion.

Coral8 Engine was selected after a rigorous evaluation because it meets Nedbank Capital's requirements:

• Offers a flexible, dynamic server architecture with an agile infrastructure capable of respondiniing immediately to changing business requirements
• Easily integrates with multiple data sources and different trading applications, in a matter of one to two days
• Is powered by familiar, SQL-based Continuous Computation Language (CCL) that reduces the learning curve and speeds development cycles for even the most sophisticated market-making strategies and algorithms
• The CCL syntax relieves the staffing pain by enabling the bank to hire developers with business domain expertise but who may have only high-level programming skills

Equally important to the bank was Coral8's open evaluation and development business model, giving businesses access - even during the trial phase - to production-grade software and to the technical support team.

"We are delighted to be a strategic part of Nedbank Capital's expansion and provide the CEP platform that is helping to transform the bank's trading environment," said Terry Cunningham, Coral8 CEO. "With Nedbank Capital, Coral8 now serves customers on every continent. Our global deployment gives us insight into a wide range of business and technology issues enterprises are facing worldwide. Ultimately, the knowledge we are building will benefit all our customers."

Nedbank Group Limited is one of the four largest banking groups in South Africa offering a wide range of business, corporate and retail banking, property finance, investment banking, private banking, foreign exchange and securities trading services. Nedbank Capital comprises the group's investment banking businesses that together manage the structuring, lending, underwriting and trading businesses.