JP Morgan's Das Kapital Earns Profits
written by Peter William Lount
version 1, September 29th, 2004

James Robertson points us to a Yahoo News article, JPMorgan Makes Smalltalk with Development Suite, that talks about the success of JPMorgan's Das Kapital financial risk management project.

As a member of the original team that built the Smalltalk implementation of "Das Kapital" (it's full name back then) I must say that Smalltalk was an obvious choice for success of such a large and complex project. NeXT's NeXTStep was pushed aside and the project was saved with it's move to Smalltalk. A new team was hired and results flowed fast and furious. For example, in the first six weeks of the project I implemented a full drag and drop graphical user interface with many more features and capabilities of the gold standard that NeXTStep/OpenStep had set, and that Mac OS X now set's with it's drag and drop.

In the decade that followed Kapital has grown and evolved into an incredible system that seems to be helping JPMorgan to manage it's complex business. Make no mistake about it they have a very complex business and modeling it isn't a walk in the park. Smalltalk helped us set a breathtaking pace and deliver the results that they needed. Obviously this is one of the great Smalltalk success stories.

It's simple, Smalltalk provides a tool that enables a team to build powerful information processing systems that can reduce or assist manage the complexity rather than create additional layers of it.

All the best,

Peter William Lount, Editor Smalltalk.org

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