“With its cloud-native infrastructure and unique ‘buy and build on top’ transparent source, Beacon allows us to enter new markets, streamline operational workflows, and leverage our proprietary pricing and analytics.” 

Managing Director, SMBC Capital Markets

Very few capital markets organizations have the luxury of deploying software into a greenfield environment. From legacy systems to customized applications, there always seems to be something special that you need to accommodate or adapt to get the benefits of modern technology. Beacon’s open architecture and collaborative developer experience give you everything you need to integrate with these existing systems. Get new features and applications and critical data to your traders and risk managers quickly and efficiently to capture a competitive edge.

There are a few different ways of connecting your existing systems with Beacon:

• Embed proprietary libraries within Beacon
• Leverage Beacon functions from within existing applications
• Capture, ingest, and share data between other systems and Beacon

Using proprietary libraries within Beacon

This approach is used when you want to leverage existing code from internal or third-party analytics libraries within your cloud-native Beacon domain. Many of our platform’s foundational components, such as frameworks and SDKs, are written primarily in Python, and much of the internals in C++, but you can integrate models and pricing libraries written in a variety of popular languages, including C, C++, Java, and R, (and of course Python), among others. 

There are two options for embedding these libraries within Beacon:

• Use your existing build processes and deploy the resulting binaries onto the Beacon Platform
• Connect your source code repository to Beacon, then build and deploy the binaries directly from within Beacon’s continuous integration and deployment pipeline for review, testing, and release.

Whichever method you choose, you get the benefit of running applications that seamlessly leverage both code written natively on the Beacon platform along with other imports from client or other vendors. You also retain full visibility and control over what code to use when and where, and full ownership of any proprietary code or intellectual property. No need for the extra fees, disclosure risks, and schedule delays that can arise with NDAs and engineering change orders to your fintech vendor. Your teams continue to develop, deploy, and support these libraries, powered with the cloud-native capabilities of Beacon’s runtime platform. Beacon clients can also use pre-packaged Docker images, or build their own custom images, to host and run third-party apps into their Beacon domain. This technique is used for alternative application frameworks, such as Plotly Dash or Streamlit, or additional data exploration tools, such as Apache Superset.

Using Beacon to support existing applications

Many clients have applications in place that they want to enhance with some of Beacon’s capabilities. For example, you can use remote procedure calls (RPCs) to link existing applications to Beacon via C#/.NET, JavaScript/JSON APIs, or RESTful endpoints. You can securely expose almost any function from Beacon and call it programmatically from an existing system. Beacon uses a proxy service to execute remote requests inside your firewalled cloud domain. While this process creates a publicly routable address, access is secured and authorized via client SSL certificates or per-user application tokens. These techniques help you support existing applications and processes or manage a gentle break up with your legacy system.

Beacon also has an Excel spreadsheet add-in that lets your team keep the familiar user interface of spreadsheets but supercharges the experience, storing and accessing data from Beacon and performing larger or more complex calculations in your secure cloud domain. In just a few steps, your spreadsheets are cloud-powered, enabling more complex calculations or large scenario runs with Beacon’s Python-based analytics and elastic cloud computing power.

Sharing data between Beacon and other systems

Finally, you can share data between Beacon and other applications with a wide variety of database tools and connectors. These data integration options make it easy to ingest market data, trading and regulatory details, and other internal or external information into Beacon, or link to the data where it is currently stored and make it look like it’s native to Beacon. Seamless communication with internal data centers or external data sources are secured and managed by IPSec VPNs. Integrated APIs facilitate links to data clouds from technology partners such as Snowflake and Amazon. Wherever your data is, Beacon enables you to build portfolios and model and manage risk across all asset classes from a single platform.

Easy integrations and effective migrations

Whether you want to trade a new product that your current system cannot support, enhance the visibility of risk and positions across your entire portfolio, or migrate to a modern, cloud-native trading and risk management system, Beacon’s open architecture, APIs, and integration tools make it easier to keep everyone in the loop. Your teams will be able to spend less time managing infrastructure and more time on activities that directly add value to the business. 

As Caroline Chang, Software Engineer and Analyst at Blackstone said, “Beacon’s flexible and extensible software model and deep integration of Snowflake are enabling us to deliver greater value to the business more quickly.”