Hi, long time trading systems hacker and originator of SpreadServe [1] here with some background: I was inspired to build it after finding myself in a meeting in a London Investment Bank in 2014 hearing a manager say "the traders have defined the accrual calcs in a spreadsheet, now we just need a couple of C# devs for a few months to build a real server to do the calcs". I realised I'd seen that pattern repeat time and again over the ten years I'd spent working on London trading floors. By hacking together Excel Addins in C++ myself I'd enabled an options trader to build a program trading system in Excel by plugging his pricing sheets into Liffe's ETO limit order books. I put an exotics trader on Bloomberg by connecting his huge 30 tab sheet to my etrading gateways, then gradually replaced the spreadsheet with C++ pricing servers. My own XLL Addin was running on hundreds of trading desktops, and I'd helped any number of traders lash together ad hoc pricing and risk spreadsheets with XLLs connecting them to market data, prices and quotes [2]. The same cycle kept repeating: trader whips up spreadsheet, sheet becomes business critical, trader tires of manual keying of data, hitting F9, and the flakiness of huge Excel sheets and demands the dev team replace the sheet with a scalable service. Then the dev team takes months to replicate the spreadsheet functionality in a C++, C# or Java server, and the trader gets frustrated by lengthy change cycles.

I realised that we can escape that frustrating cycle by building a server runtime for spreadsheets. Just as node.js took JavaScript to the server side, SpreadServe is "node.xls": an asynchronous scalable server side runtime for Excel spreadsheets that supports XLLs, RTD & VBA as well as a REST API, RDBMS integration and websockets subscribers. As Felienne says [3] "spreadsheets are code". But that code is trapped in a desktop IDE for grid based visual functional programming: Excel! And that's not the right environment for reliable automated operation. So SpreadServe's aim is to separate the development and rumtime environments for calc heavy spreadsheets: Excel for rapid change cycles by tech savvy power users like traders, then SpreadServe for production scalability, resilience and audit logging.

[1] http://spreadserve.com

[2] http://babbingtonslade.com/industries/

[3] https://etrading.wordpress.com/2015/08/13/spreadsheets-are-c...