NYSE announced a "community" cloud infrastructure based on Intel blade servers, VMware vShield and EMC's VNX unified storage for capital markets.
NEW
YORK-The technology services arm of the New York Stock Exchange Euronext has
launched a cloud computing platform that will allow trading firms and banks to
outsource their operations. This is the first public "financial
services-specific" cloud platform, NYSE Technologies said.
The
cloud, officially known as the Capital Markets Community Platform, will host
customer applications and trading services, Dominique Cerutti, NYSE Euronext
president and CEO, said at the launch event here on June 1. The platform will
offer electronic trading, market data analysis, algorithm testing and
regulatory reporting. Customers will also be able to access cloud-based
versions of NYSE services such as Superfeed, Risk Management Gateway and the
Managed Services Hub.
NYSE
Technologies teamed up with virtualization software vendor VMware and data
storage giant EMC to create the Community Platform. CMPC, expected to go live
July 1, is running on Intel Xeon-powered blade servers from Hewlett-Packard,
EMC's VNX unified storage platform and VMware's vShield.
"We
said, 'Let us do the plumbing,'" Stanley Young, NYSE Technologies CEO, said at
the launch event. NYSE Technologies will take care of the platform and the
infrastructure and let the clients focus on the services, according to Young.
NYSE
Technologies will be creating a virtual trading hub that will connect large and
small trading firms. The Community Platform differs from private hubs from
groups such as Equinix because it will be a more open and public platform,
Young said.
"We're
market-neutral in the sense that we run markets, but we also enable
transactions to flow through other markets," said Young.
NYSE
Technologies will be using its two "massive" state-of-the-art data centers in
Mahwah, N.J., and Basildon, England, according to Young. NYSE plans to partner
with other liquidity centers in Sao Paolo, Toronto and Tokyo to create
"satellite hubs," Young said.
"Order
management systems, execution management systems, back testing-so much of the
flow can be contained within the physical walls of our data center, reducing
the time to trade," said Young.
The
"community cloud" will not be connected to the rest of the Internet, but users
will be able to interact with each other, according to Carl Eschenbach, head of
cloud systems at VMware.
Trading
firms and banks are interested in outsourcing more aspects of their business to
cut costs while still investing in cutting-edge technology and taking advantage
of new platforms. While the financial services industry as a whole tends to be early
adopters of new technology, financial markets have been relatively slow to
embrace cloud services, primarily because of lingering concerns over security
and compliance in the cloud.
"The
goal is an open platform to enable frictionless trading," said Young.
NYSE's
cloud will provide trading data that can be used to test algorithms with NYSE
market data, saving time and expense of downloading the data to a separate
center. It can also host proprietary trading software, although firms can also
choose to use dedicated hardware in a private cloud scenario. Cerutti noted
that the cloud will be most useful for historical market data analysis. Instead
of having to download the data late at night, a process that may take several
hours, and then uploading it to the customer servers before running any kind of
analysis, customers can just point their analytics tools to the cloud for immediate
data processing, Cerutti said.
"These
are not set-the-world-alight applications ... but they take massive costs out
of the industry," Young said.
"We're
seeing the first of a wave of these special-purpose clouds," said EMC
President and COO Howard Elias at the event.
Although
NYSE is opening up its data centers to customers, it will not provide the
actual infrastructure. Customers will log in through vCloud Director and
provision an operating system, either Red Hat Linux or Windows, and then
install their own software, according to Young. NYSE will also offer only
dedicated hardware for real-time trading systems, not virtual servers,
according to Cerutti.
Pico
Quantitative Trading, a division of Goldman Sachs, and Millennium Management, a
hedge fund, have already signed up as customers and began the beta program over
the weekend, Young said. NYSE Technologies has a roster of more than 1,200 buy-
and sell-side companies, and Young said he hopes all of them will eventually
take advantage of the service.
Startup
companies will find it cheaper to launch with NYSE's cloud computing platform
because they won't need to make "significant capital expenditures," said Jarrod
Yuster, Pico's CEO.
NYSE
Technologies reported annual revenues of $460 million at the end of 2010, but
plans to hit $1 billion in sales by 2015. Cerutti said this cloud platform will
go a long way toward enabling the company to reach this goal.
"People
cannot go back to the business model of three years ago. Clients are asking for
more services at less cost," Young said.
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