Share trading exchange Turquoise,
funded by nine investment banks, will next month finish a
pan-europeantrading platformthat has taken only
six months to develop using off-the-shelf software.
The company, which was launched by firms including Goldman Sachs
and Morgan Stanley to compete with stock exchanges across Europe,
has chosen applications and is connecting them using messaging
technology. The firm's infrastructure will be based on the Red Hat
Linux operating system to ensure flexibilty and scalability.
Yann L'Huillier, CTO at the company, led a team of 120 people
who started the IT project in October.
He told Computer Weekly that he took this approach because
applications can be taken out and refreshed or replaced if the
technology requirement changes without massive time and financial
costs. "I am trying to ensure that the technology is architected so
that it is flexible, and if we need to change something we only
have to change individual systems," he said.
The ability to change an IT infrastructure is important in the
stock trading sector to prevent competitors gaining an advantage,
he said. "This is the way to architect an IT to ensure you can
always be at the same stage as companies that are just starting
up," he said.
Bob McDowall, analyst at Towergroup, said that historically,
exchanges have tended to build huge projects and there have been a
number of disasters. "Turquoise is taking the best-of-breed
applications and that is the right thing to do," he said.
The ability to rapidly change technology is good because
Turquoise cannot be certain how its business and the market will
develop. "Being able to pull out and replace technology means it
can remain competitive in terms of speed and the cost of
processing."
The EU's Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, introduced
in November, meant exchanges that offer the best deal in terms of
cost and speed will prosper as investment firms are obligated to
offer customers the best deal available.
The applications being used by Turquoise include its core
trading platform from supplier Cinnober and a combination of
Progress Software and Detica technology for its market surveillance
application. It also uses software from Neonet to provide market
data and Euroccp for clearing and settlement services. The
infrastructure is housed in two datacentres run by financial
services IT service provider BT Radianz and is made up of HP blade
servers running on Linux Red Hat.
PJ Di Giammarino, CEO at financial services think tank JWG-IT,
said an exchange must get its technology right if it is to get
investment firms to use it. "The market will not be patient if
[Turquoise's platform] is not as fast as those participants already
there or new entrants." He said that exchanges are only as good as
their base technologies.
Turquoise timeline
November 2006 - Planned launch of pan-European trading platform
Project Turquoise announced
April 18 2007 - Turquoise selects EuroCCP clearing and
settlement application
October 25 2007 - Announces Cinnober as trading platform
provider and begins building IT infrastructure
13 November 2007 - Appoints Yann L'Huillier as the chief
technology officer
28 January 2008 - Progress Software and Detica chosen to deliver
a real-time market surveillance system
14 February 2008 - Partners with AppLabs for platform
testing
26 February 2008 - Selects BT for secure hosting services
April 2008 - Planned completion of implementation of IT
infrastructure
September 2008 - Planned launch