The UK's major banks and hundreds of City trading firms
will begin testing the London Stock Exchange's new core trading
platform early next month, ahead of its planned launch in the
summer of 2007.
The Tradelect platform is the final part of a four-year IT
transformation programme designed to increase capacity, cut latency
and enable new services to be rolled out more quickly and at lower
cost.
Testing will focus on speed and systems compatibility. It will
involve all the stock exchange's 335 plugged-in broker member
companies running conformance tests in dedicated time slots.
As well as testing the speed of the system, firms will be
weighing up what application development work will be needed to
take best advantage of the platform's new functionality.
Robin Paine, chief technology officer at the London Stock
Exchange, said, "Tradelect is largely backwards-compatible with the
existing platform, but not totally. Some enhancements that have
been made support more complexity than certain firms will want to
utilise."
Member firms will not have to upgrade their hardware to use
Tradelect, and help with integration and development work will be
available from a 170-strong team from Accenture if necessary.
Accenture built the Tradelect platform in India between late
2004 and March this year. It uses much the same core infrastructure
as the London Stock Exchange's Infolect high-speed market data
broadcast system.
Introduced a year ago, Infolect has increased data transfer
speeds from 30 milliseconds to two milliseconds.
Tradelect will run on the same "Extranex" privately managed IP
network as Infolect and will rely on high-speed middleware
developed in-house, which was created using Microsoft's C#
programming language and the .net Framework.
The system will run on Hewlett-Packard servers powered by 2.2GHz
dual-core AMD Opteron processors.
Public testing of the Tradelect platform is almost the final act
of a four-year IT transformation programme at the London Stock
Exchange.
The programme has seen the exchange move to a more commoditised
and scalable infrastructure in an effort to keep pace with market
demands and control costs.
The London Stock Exchange estimates that moving from proprietary
legacy systems will cut operating costs by 20%, with savings being
made in hardware, networks, staff, service delivery and
development.
Project timetable
- Corporate datawarehouse upgrade completed in 2003
- Migration to Infolect completed in September 2005
- Migration of the trading system to Tradelect scheduled for Q2
2007.
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