Active Pivot has been integrated with Calyon's in-house pricing and risk management application, AsteRisk, and enables traders to aggregate risk along multi-dimensional axes to efficiently manage their intra-day risk.

Benoit Gautier, Head of Commodities IT Exotics Projects at Calyon, said "In order to better react to the fast changing requirements of the commodities market, especially for structured products, Calyon decided to build, rather than buy, an exotic commodities trading platform. ActivePivot complemented our development and enabled us to shorten the time to market - an important goal of our overall project, as you can imagine."

ActivePivot is a real-time, object oriented OLAP tool that aggregates and applies business methods to any data, in any format. As ActivePivot is a true SOA component and completely open, it imbedded seamlessly into Calyon's existing infrastructure and in-house trading application. It also allowed Calyon to leverage their investment in data caching and grid infrastructures already in place, such as GigaSpaces and DataSynapse.

ActivePivot's unique features enabled Calyon's commodity users to perform risk reporting and business intelligence analysis in real-time. The ActivePivot OLAP engine also enabled them to drill down from a global position to individual risk classes and maturities, a key feature in the commodities markets.

The implementation of ActivePivot enables the traders - using Microsoft Excel with which they are familiar - to flexibly "slice & dice" their real time risk data any way they want to see it. This is a major advantage over the ad-hoc spreadsheet approach that was in place before ActivePivot was implemented as it was costly and time-consuming. Another cost reduction will come from the re-use of the ActivePivot component for other business intelligence requirements at a later date, such as Value-at-Risk (VaR) and cash flow management.

"We were delighted when Calyon choose our niche aggregation and data distribution tool for their risk reporting needs. The unique features of ActivePivot enabled them to easily and quickly integrate it within their overall infrastructure, improve their commodity trader's agility, and lower existing costs" explained Georges Bory, Quartet founder and financial industry expert.