Thousands of IT professionals working in the City of
London are preparing for three weekends of live testing on the
London Stock Exchange's new core trading
platform, Tradelect, ahead of its planned launch later this
year.
The London Stock Exchange's 335 plugged-in member companies,
including all the investment banks, will take part in the first
live test of Tradelect on 28 April.
The second weekend test on 19 May will be optional, but all of
the exchange's members will have to participate in the final live
test on 2 June.
The launch of the Tradelect platform is the final part of a
four-year IT transformation programme at the exchange. The aim is
to increase capacity and enable new services to be rolled out more
quickly at lower cost.
Tradelect will enable the exchange to complete transactions in
just 10 milliseconds, rather than the 110 milliseconds achieved
with the current Sets trading platform.
Wendy Morgan, head of real-time data information services at the
London Stock Exchange, said, "Each test will be like a normal day
at work for everyone. We will bring down the systems on the Friday
night and start up Tradelect on the Saturday morning.
"Our members will ask their front desks to come in, as well as
their back-office processing functions."
The companies that trade on the London Stock Exchange have had
to make changes to their software to integrate with Tradelect, but
hardware is unaffected.
Although Tradelect is mostly backwards-compatible with Sets, it
includes software enhancements that offer extra functionality to
members, but requires them to make changes to their
applications.
The three live tests are to ensure that any application
development work undertaken by member firms works with the new
platform.
Morgan said, "We are making sure our members are compliant and
will not get swamped with data when Tradelect goes live."
Last year, shares worth £5.8tn were traded on the London Stock
Exchange, making it the third largest financial market in the
world.
Tradelect was developed by the exchange's outsourcing supplier
Accenture in India between late 2004 and March 2006. The platform
runs on an IP network managed by US supplier Verizon and relies on
high-speed middleware developed in-house using the .net
framework.
City prepares for
new trading platform
More about Tradelect
www.londonstockexchange.com/en-gb/products/membershiptrading/tradingservices/tradelect
Related article:
How the stock exchange developed the Tradelect platform
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2006/09/26/218637/city-prepares-to-test-new-trading-platform.htm
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