A forward-thinking IT strategy is enabling theLondon Stock Exchangeto double the
capacity of its trading platform in just one month, as it prepares
for the transfer of equities trading fromBorsa Italiananext year.
The London Stock Exchange revealed plans to increase the
capacity of its
Tradelect platform from 2,500 to 5,000 messages per second
following the completion of its £1.63bn acquisition of the
Milan-based exchange on 1 October. The exchange aims to take in
all the equities traded on Borsa Italiana by September 2008.
Tradelect, a complex piece of
middleware,
was part of a £40m, four-year technology programme completed in
June. The IT department planned for substantial software reuse when
developing the platform, which would enable systems to be adapted
rapidly to meet changing business requirements.
The benefits of such an approach are now apparent. Robin Paine,
chief technology officer at the London Stock Exchange, said, "We
need to deploy extra capacity ahead of the Borsa Italiana
integration, and given that it is so straightforward, we may as
well do it now because the London market participants can get the
benefit."
Bob McDowall, senior analyst at research firm TowerGroup, said
the speed with which the exchange planned to double Tradelect's
capacity was impressive. He added that the company's technology
planning had been good given the uncertainty of the market it
operates in. "It has built in flexibility, which is a very good
idea," he said.
Paine said the 12-month timeframe for absorbing the Borsa
Italiana business was only possible because of the way Tradelect
had been developed.
The software was written so that the code could be re-used
across different products and could be adapted to take in new
business models. It was also designed to run on off-the-shelf
servers, which made it relatively cheap and simple to add
capacity.
"Tradelect runs on several hundred commodity servers, and it is
written in a modular way so that we can scale it linearly just by
plugging in servers," said Paine.
He said Tradelect's predecessor, Sets, was very expensive and
time-consuming to upgrade.
"It would probably have taken three years to integrate [the
Borsa Italiana business] without Tradelect," said Paine.