OM Technology

OM, a Swedish options and futures exchange founded in 1985, is known for its pioneering trading technology. In 1998, OM acquired the Stockholm Stock Exchange, further expanding its influence in global markets. By 2003, OM merged with the Helsinki Stock Exchange to form OMX, combining the two major Nordic exchanges. Later, in 2008, the Stockholm Stock Exchange became part of Nasdaq, Inc. and was renamed Nasdaq Stockholm.

One of OM’s most significant technological innovations was the development of the OM CLICK system, which was responsible for managing millions of contracts traded daily across global markets. The OM CLICK application, which initially ran on a DEC/VMS system, became so successful that OM created a separate business entity to market the system as OM Systems International. The system was widely recognized for its speed, security, and continuous upgrades.

As OM sought to expand and improve its operations, they approached IBM and Sector7 to migrate the OM CLICK exchange system to the IBM RS/6000 AIX platform. This migration included the full conversion of the DEC/VMS Rdb database to Oracle and DB2, and the transformation of critical system components from Pascal to C. With over 2 million lines of code to migrate, performance, scalability, and reliability were crucial to the project's success.

The project spanned nearly 18 months, with extensive testing and validation to ensure that OM’s critical financial services continued uninterrupted. One key focus was minimizing code changes and maintaining a single source code tree for ease of future maintenance across both the AIX and VMS platforms. This helped OM seamlessly transition to a scalable and future-proof system that met the growing demands of their global exchange network.

The successful migration allowed OM to retain its core functionalities while benefiting from the scalability and performance improvements offered by the IBM RS/6000 platform. By migrating to IBM AIX, OM was able to support their expanding global operations, which were further strengthened when the Stockholm and Helsinki exchanges merged, and eventually when the exchange became part of Nasdaq Stockholm in 2008.