The cost benefits are also compelling. Homan estimates programmers can generate code using C# at half the cost of Cobol. And, because newer languages unhitch programmers from mainframes and other proprietary platforms, money saved on hardware gets factored into total cost of ownership. Moving from a proprietary hardware platform that requires an older programming language to Intel-based servers that allow for newer development tools can pay for itself in three years, Homan estimates. The exchange is assessing whether the economics justify moving its trading operations from the Hewlett-Packard Himalaya systems that require Cobol programming.
Meanwhile, the London Stock Exchange is writing most new applications using Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net 2003 development system, the C# language, and the .Net Framework in Windows Server 2003. In April, after 10 months of design, development, and testing, the exchange used that combination of Microsoft technologies to launch an application that delivers real-time market information to traders and other customers. The exchange's programming work is done by 100 to 150 engineers who are employees of Accenture; the number fluctuates depending on need.
On this side of the Atlantic, a smaller team of developers is using a different approach to build data-rich applications of another kind. The NHL's staff of five programmers uses open-source tools and Java to write applications that let various user constituencies--fans, sports writers, broadcasters, team executives--slice and dice hockey statistics. Grant Nodine, senior director of Web operations for the NHL, says the decision to use open-source tools such as the NetBeans development environment and Cayenne data-modeling framework was only partly a cost-saving move. "I personally have found the open-source tools tend to be better documented and more up-to-date than their commercial counterparts," Nodine says.
Still, the NHL's programmers are under pressure to control costs and increase efficiency. One way they've done that is by creating a common framework of methods and functions that sits between newly developed number-crunching applications and the back-end Oracle database that houses player and game statistics. "We're developing applications in such a way that it significantly reduces the amount of time necessary to manage them," Nodine says.
Detroit Edison, a subsidiary of DTE Energy Co., is taking a different path to software-development efficiency. A few months ago, the utility signed up for a service from TopCoder Inc. that lets it submit work requests to the outsourcing company, which uses thousands of freelance developers located in more than 100 countries. Detroit Edison also gains access to growing catalogs of J2EE and .Net infrastructure components developed by TopCoder programmers. "Prebuilt, pretested components shorten your development time," says Rod Davenport, technology strategist with Detroit Edison, which has its own staff of 300 developers. "This gives us another way to have a greater variety of components and leverage developers at pretty low cost."
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