An Open Approach to Desktop Interoperability with FDC3

We envision Symphony as the connective tissue between systems and desktop applications for data driven collaboration between internal and external parties. To achieve our vision Symphony will continue to offer different integration and platform extensibility options to make delivery of new and innovative solutions easier and faster. Specifically we will:

• Further develop our client and bot extension capabilities by exposing new APIs and simplifying third party extensions development and deployment. For example, the new 2.0 version of the bot development toolkit ( BDK ) automatically generates code to address lower level technical aspects so that developers can concentrate on coding business logic. Similarly, our Elements UI framework offers a much easier and quicker way to build interactive UI components without the deployment challenges associated with deploying extension applications. More improvements to our core extensibility framework are in the works and will be announced in due course.
• Work closely with the FDC3 community to define and implement FDC3 compliant interfaces on the desktop. The approach will empower the end user with the ability to easily pass data driven context in and out of the Symphony desktop application for a more efficient and intelligent collaboration workflow. For example, a buy side trader could extract trade related information from a chat room with a dealer with a single click and push it as a structured message to her OMS application so that she doesn’t have to retype it. Conversely, an operations professional could initiate a conversation about a trade break with all relevant counterparts with a single click from her trade reconciliation system so that she doesn’t have to create a room, add participants, and retype the economics of the trade.

With heavy contribution from our clients and partners, we are in the process of finalizing a list of most impactful desktop integration use cases. The use cases range from being able to create a room, stage or send a message in Symphony from a trusted application to more complex scenarios where a user might be able to extract a context (i.e. post trade details ) in a structured format from a Symphony chat message with a single click and send it to another application for further processing. Also as we work to integrate Cloud9 and StreetLinx with the Symphony platform, we will identify features offered by these products that we can potentially expose via an FDC3 interface.

We continue to improve and expand the way our customers and partners can build and deploy platform extensions and integrations. By offering both server side and desktop APIs, we look to empower our clients and partners with the right set of tools to continue adding value and optimizations to the collaboration process. In the future, we will provide more specific details about our plan to enable the Symphony desktop client for desktop interoperability with FDC3. If you would like to discuss extensibility and/or integration strategy, I’d welcome the discussion.