Beacon Core is an end-to-end platform designed to supercharge developer productivity. Beacon Core includes enterprise-scale elastic cloud infrastructure, a modern data warehouse, collaborative developer tools, automation services, and a robust and controlled production environment.

Integrated Development Environment

Based on Visual Studio code, Beacon’s web-based IDE empowers developers to rapidly build, test, and deploy analytics and applications to business users. Customize and boost productivity with the vast amount of extensions available in the Visual Studio Marketplace.

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Develop

For example, a developer creates a new pricing model and runs it in a trading application just like a trader would run it in production, with only the incremental code change difference. Crucially, these tests are easily done many times per day without having to build and manage user acceptance test environments.

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Release

Once satisfied with the new feature, the developer releases the feature to production with Beacon’s controls workflow. All source code is categorized, with different controls attached to different categories, so that new features that do not affect risk can be released intraday.

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Customize

Beacon’s controls workflow was forged in global investment banks to foster innovation within a highly regulated and tightly controlled environment. We help you customize Beacon’s workflow to balance the opportunities and risks between innovation and controls.

Infrastructure Management

With integrated enterprise technology tools, Beacon manages the infrastructure and hosts your analytics so that you can focus on your edge or competitive advantage.We currently support Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.

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Batch Job Scheduler

  • Automate manual tasks with user-friendly batch job scheduler, so that you can focus on adding value to the business
  • Leverage Beacon’s elastic compute framework to automatically manage batch job infrastructure
  • Deploy reports to your users quickly and easily with robust reporting framework that respects entitlements and maintains reporting history

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Data Management

  • Ingest, process, and store data with a comprehensive data warehouse and tool set
  • Facilitate broad selection of data with plug-and-play capabilities and external adapters and collectors
  • Ensure data quality and consistency with explicit authentication certificates and bitemporal storage for easy rollbacks
  • Data includes external markets, internal markets, contractual data, and fundamental data

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Disaster Recovery

  • Maintain multiple failover versions of your entire Beacon environment automatically, including all of your own data and source code
  • Synchronize data continuously across all backup platforms
  • Distribute disaster recovery across zones within a region and replication of backup platforms across independent regions

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Compute Grid Scheduler

  • Provide compute resources for your end-user applications, Excel backends, automated testing, and developer services with Beacon’s proprietary elastic compute framework
  • Reduce hardware and system administration costs with scalable, automated infrastructure management
  • Deliver full transparency into system state and facilitate user intervention with comprehensive dashboards

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Security and Permissions

  • Control your own secure and fully segregated Beacon instance, with your own encryption keys and your choice of cloud provider
  • Encrypt all external data transfers with SSL, internal data between core services, as well encryption of persistent and at rest data
  • Enforce user roles, groups, and entitlements automatically
  • Support secure operations with integrated secrets management

Web Application Framework

Beacon makes it easy for Python developers to expose analytics and data as full stack web applications to your end users. Glint abstracts away common HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so that everyone can be a UI expert using only one common language.

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Glint app development framework

With Beacon's Glint app development framework, your quant developers script out applications entirely in Python code. Glint transpiles your code on the fly into rich, full stack web apps with live two-way bindings to your data source, while leveraging the performance and ease of Gromit. This enables your developers to iteratively build, test, and tweak end-user applications easily, without having to coordinate a convoluted technology stack.

Core Components

A broad set of Core components, from a sophisticated data warehouse to powerful life-cycle management tools, reduce developer overhead. Some examples from Beacon’s end-to-end enterprise architecture include:

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Data Visualization

  • Use a range of data visualization tools included in Beacon Platform components
  • Leverage the dedicated visualization framework, Apache Superset, for modern data exploration and visualization
  • Build customizable reports based on any relational dataset

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Gromit Dependency Graph

  • Use descriptive names to organize objects and methods with Gromit, Beacon’s dependency graph framework
  • Connect input values and calculations similar to Excel names, but with greater flexibility and organization
  • See values automatically recalculate on input changes, trigger callbacks, and cache independent values
  • Step through dependency graph to see input relationships and dependencies, a great debugging tool

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Integrated Object Database

  • Provides scalable, flexible data fabric for Beacon platform, including storage of Gromit Dependency Graph objects
  • Support wide variety and changeability of data shapes and sizes typical in financial markets
  • Uses MongoDB for underlying datastore, but Beacon object API is not tightly linked with a particular database or implementation
  • Integrate and access other relational databases and file stores inside of Beacon, if desired

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Software Development Life Cycle

  • Manage versions, reviews, quality control, code deployment, and other processes from development to production
  • Balance technology controls with nimble and iterative development of new functionality with broad range of workflow tools
  • Boost productivity with tight integration between Git, code review workflows, and Beacon’s IDE, and easily collaborate with other developers 
  • Ensure platform resilience by leveraging Beacon’s testing framework and integrated developer tools, such as SonarQube

Get in Touch

Learn about how we can help you transform your business.Contact us for a 15 minute consultation or to request a full demo.