RiskServers SA specializes in High Quality Financial Risk Management Modeling.

Financial Risk Management Server Development is a highly specialized field that requires  expertise in numerous areas: 
Financial Engineering and Quantitative Analysis.
Market and Credit Data computation. 
Regulatory Reporting. 
Wealth Management.
Hedge fund Risk Management.
Pension fund Risk Management.
Asset and Liability Management.
Portfolio and Asset Management.
AAA Derivative Product Companies (DPC) and Credit Enhancement Techniques. 
Operational Research.
Network programming.
Multivariate Analysis.
Data Storage and DB IO.
Advanced Numerical Techniques.
Computer Resource Optimization.
Low Level programming. Memory mapping, garbage collection & assembler.
Secure programming. SSL, TLS, cryptography and signature recognition (licensing)
Web Server development, http, snmpt,xhtml and xml.


No Scripts Attached!

Risksvr(tm), crystallizes all this knowledge into one  compact executable of less than four (4) Megabytes of pure C/C++ code. 
The Risksvr Engine, as well as other modules on the web sites do NOT rely on web scripting languages such as asp, jsp, php, cfm, perl or other interpreted languages  to provide dynamic content. (see below)

Risksvr™ Development History

In 1997, the first Web enabled prototype of Risksvr saw life. 

At the time many "web" languages had just emerged. Each language enthusiast was flaunting the features of his language. Real information was scarce. 

To avoid the Java snare in which we almost fell in 1995 we decided to follow a hands-on approach while setting basic requirements in terms of performance.
(we remember being told by Sun's development team performance was not an issue,.. .. with time speed would easily converge to that of C. Despite all the sales pitch, a Layer always has a cost, be it c++ over c or Java over c++).

And so we embarked on developing web front ends for the calculation server. 

Development Experience: Future Net Developers take note!

ASP- ISAPI Experience:
The web server-stubs were first coded as asp modules and  ISAPI objects. 
Performance was alas dismal in real world tests (but quite good under development !)
Even with highly optimized C/C++ code in the calculation engine, asp wrappers did not offer the necessary snappiness to provide the user experience we were after (in some instances Risksvr needs to read 100's of sources of data (depending on configuration might be DB Tables, Cached Memory or Files) and this each time calculations are performed!

JSP Experience:
The modules were then tested as JSP and Java pages. Although easier to debug and test, performance was better but unfortunately still unsatisfactory! 


PHP Experience:
The front end user interface was then redesigned as PHP scripts. Initially the interface seems snappier and faster than asp, but reacted poorly with many concurrent users.

C# Experience:
C# is an interpreted language and is actually quite close to php (or by all means Visual Basic).
Many people assume it is just as good as C or C++, which it is clearly not!
Initial prototypes with c# had the same performance profile as PHP. 
C# is however much better in terms of tools and debugging support

Despite their clear advantage as RAD languages, 
Interpreted languages such as ASP, JSP, C# (VB) or PHP  do not offer the required speed, 
resource efficiency and low level power needed to steer Financial Risk Management Applications!

Only C and C++ offer the right performance profile for this type of web development! 

Very few Web experts consider C or C++, as a viable language for web development. Truth is, there seems to be a drive to force users into adopting proprietary languages that are much slower than the C/C++ alternative.

C/ C++ Experience as Net Language:
The long and unforgiving route of C/C++ was thus taken for both client and server modules.

Thanks to rigorous coding standards and proprietary low level library routines (io, streams, sockets, string operations (string compares, char to int and int to char conversion, file parsing, date handling, holidays, dictionaries, hash maps and random generation), The same Risksvr™ engine has been run on most industry standard operating systems used in number crunching: Cray, AIX, HP, Sun Ultra Sparc, FreeBSD, Alpha 64, Windows 2000, NT4, Windows 98, 95, Dos and Macintosh.

Emphasis has also been placed on Risksvr's architecture to provide integrated suites of standalone applications that can act as components (with or without idl). 
This architecture has proven to be the best design in terms of third party application integration, linkage to other languages and cross platform configuration. 

Versions of Risksvr™ have been developed under different packages and flavors:
From conventional standalone application on dos, Windows, Linux, Crays, to Dedicated C++ web server, ISAPI COM object, Apache Modules, Java Native Interface Library, Excel dll (XLL), dedicated spreadsheet server and distributed components.