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Integrated What-If Analysis
Users like spreadsheets because of their ability to experiment without impacting other users. The drawback of this approach however is that these exercises tend to be one off, aren’t easily shared with other users, aren’t able to incorporate intraday changes as they occur. The Armanta Sandbox provides customers with a highly sophisticated, scalable solution to this problem. The sandbox is a scratch area in which changes can be made that will not affect users outside of that sandbox. These changes could be as simple as modifications to some numeric value, or more complex, as in a large set of proposed trades. Users can create and share as many different sandboxes as they like, changing values as required and then viewing reports inside of the sandbox to see how those changes would affect their portfolios. Changes made outside of the sandbox flow into the sandbox, ensuring that users’ scenarios don’t become stale.
A sandbox is managed by the framework in a highly optimized manner. The sandbox only contains the incremental changes made within that sandbox. These incremental changes are then layered on top of the global copy of the data managed by the Intelligence Cache. This approach serves to dramatically reduce the footprint required across multiple sandboxes. Calculations are also managed in an optimal fashion. Only those values whose calculation depends upon a value in the sandbox will require a separate computation in the sandbox.
As an example, consider market value, which is based upon a holding amount. Until holding amount is actually overridden in the sandbox
for a given holding, only one instance of market value needs to be managed by the framework. As soon as holding amount is modified in
a sandbox, a new market value specific to that sandbox will be computed and cached.
Changes in a sandbox consist of modifications of values as well as entity inserts and removals. Every field that has been designated
as editable within Armanta can be modified within a sandbox with no additional effort. Changes within a sandbox are easily published globally on demand by any user having the appropriate authorization. More advanced functionality can be implemented very quickly
using a simple API.
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