Brokat

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Brokat AG was a software company based in Stuttgart, Germany. Former names were BROKAT Informationssysteme GmbH and BROKAT Systems. It was founded and led by Stefan Roever.

The company was first headquartered in Böblingen, Germany and it moved to nearby Stuttgart in December 1997.

1 Origins
2 Twister
3 Notes
4 External links

[edit] Origins

Brokat developed mostly banking-related software and provided professional services mainly to financial institutions. Brokat was known for its encryption server and applet technology named XPresso, which made strong pioneering encryption (128bit symmetric) available without US (especially NSA) interference. Brokat sold its software to many large financial institutions mainly in Europe and especially in Germany. Despite that, the software was sold to startups that tried to establish pure electronic businesses like banking or stock trading. A prominent example for the later is Cortal Consors. To integrate XPresso with the backend systems of the customers, many experience and sourcecode had been built up at Brokat and this became the base for the Brokat middleware product called Twister.

After completing acquisitions of several smaller companies, Brokat was caught in the bust of the dot-com bubble declared bankruptcy in 2001.^[1]

During the liquidation, the engineering core was spun off as Encorus Technologies. Encorus focused on software and professional services for the "mobile payment" business (payment by the means of mobile phones). Encorus was founded by eONE Global which itself was "formed" by First Data. On August 9th, 2005, First Data wrote-off its investment in Encorus.

The Professional Services department and the rest of Brokat was bought by Brokat's longtime opponent in the German market Data Design in 2001. They are still in the business (Feb. 2006) and offer former Brokat Twister customers migration solutions to other middleware products. Data Design still faces competition from a group of former Brokat employees, who founded Syngenio, a company that offers migration solutions.

[edit] Twister

Twister was the main product of Brokat AG. It was a proprietary middleware software that was created in the late 1990s and was always sold as the central software product in all projects. The software was mainly sold to financial institutions which also relied on the XPresso encryption software of Brokat.

The base of Twister was a CORBA ORB written in C++ that handled requests from so-called Gateways and routed them to so-called RDOs. RDO stands for "Repository Defined Object" and that was basically the same as "Server Side Objects" written in Java today. RDOs could be written in TCL, Java or C++ and could interact with each other via the ORB if necessary. In real world applications though, all the RDOs for one customer were written in the same language due to maintenance of the system.

Twister was capable of handling very high loads and was thus used by electronic stock traders like Cortal Consors for real-time trading. During the morning hours when the stock exchange opened, the Twister System at Consors was known to handle several thousand connections/requests simultaneously.