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Xenomorph’s thoughts on Excel Services
Chris Budgen, Chief Technical Architect, Xenomorph
- What do you see as the main benefits of Excel Services in financial markets?
- I think that Excel will more and more become a “formal” programming tool for the rapid definition of business logic that can then be incorporated and leveraged in other systems and processes. Areas such as risk management, product control and structured product trading should benefit greatly from how easy it will be to deploy and lock-down new and complex functionality.
- How do you see Excel Services fitting with Xenomorph’s TimeScape?
- Very well, I hope! I would view Excel Services as yet another way in which Xenomorph’s clients can rapidly integrate their own proprietary business logic within our TimeScape analytics and data management system. With the easy integration of Excel Services with TimeScape, clients will be able to apply spreadsheet logic and calculations to larger instrument and portfolio datasets, and do this more quickly.
- What have Xenomorph done with Excel Services so far?
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Xenomorph has been an active participant in the Excel 12 Beta Program and our team has spent a lot of team working with Danny Khen and the rest of the Excel team at Microsoft. In particular, we have integrated Excel Services with our query language, TimeScape QL+, so that complex expressions involving tick/time series, market data preferences, spreadsheet functionality and pricing models can be defined and used throughout the whole of TimeScape. We want to make the process of fully integrating Excel functionality as easy as possible for all users so that we can maximise productivity for programmers and non-programmers a like.
As a related aside, it is also worth mentioning that the integration of Excel Services as an object within TimeScape QL+ is a related project to our existing automatic integration of Excel XLL add-in functions within QL+. Having both available means that clients can integrate either single pricing functions from an add-in, or business logic from a whole spreadsheet. The server-side usage of XLLs in TimeScape is worth mentioning since this is not directly supported by Excel Services. Choice is one of the key things our clients look for, and so keeping TimeScape open to either integration route is a positive thing in my view.
- How does Excel Services fit with Xenomorph’s Spreadsheet Inside technology?
- As a natural extension of it, really. Spreadsheet Inside is a database-based technology that allows complex statistical analytics and reports to be defined quickly with spreadsheet-like operations and deployed quickly throughout TimeScape. It does however have some differences from Excel in that it has cells that can contain vectors and arrays, so that a simple operation such as cell C1 = A1 – B1 might be calculating the spread between many tens of thousands of tick data points for example. The TimeScape interface to Excel Services exposes all of the richness of graphing and formatting found in Excel, and allows users to use spreadsheet logic in TimeScape without making any invasive changes to their spreadsheets. For both reasons it is complementary to SpreadSheet Inside and moves the whole premise of extremely flexible and powerful data management with TimeScape another step forward!
Chris Budgen, Chief Technical Architect, Xenomorph