Edwin Marcial Makes Improvements at ICE

New clearinghouses in Euopre and U.S. will share technology platform, Platform improvements cut response time from 600 ms to 28 ms, Production data center moving to Chicago; disaster recovery to Atlanta

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)

Edwin Marcial

CTO and SVP

PREVIOUS POSITIONS:
Developer, ICE; senior engineer in energy control systems, Harris Corp.

EDUCATION:
B.S., University of Florida.

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)
2100 Riveredge Pkwy, Suite 500
Atlanta, GA 30328

SIZE OF FIRM:
Market capitalization of $11 billion.

WHO WAS YOUR MENTOR?
A couple of people have influenced me. One was my father. He was a very hardworking person. He was very entrepreneurial -- always worked on his own. And our CEO, Jeff Sprecher -- working with him and seeing the company grow from five or six employees to what it has become today. It has been a learning experience for me.

LAST GOOD BOOK READ:
"The Autobiography of Ben Franklin," by Ben Franklin.

What's Next?

There are a couple of areas in which our industry will need to adapt. One is market data -- the explosion of trading volumes in all asset classes. There has been a corresponding explosion in market data. There will be an explosion in how we will disseminate it and store it and keep up with the growing data. How the user interacts, the extent they interact with the interface -- we have been stuck in the same mouse-driven applications; we will be extending beyond that. The actual UI, there can be something done to make that easier, slicker, faster and also more portable so that as companies become more mobile, users can take that information wherever they go.

VITALS

IT Budget:

N/A

Key Technology Management:

Eight executives, including VP of engineering, director of development, director of databases, director of Q/A.

Size of Technology Team:

175.

Percent of IT Projects Outsourced:

Close to zero.

Key Technology Partners:

N/A

Success Metrics:

The main metric -- the most important one -- is success in our business. If we can add additional products and customers and get our volumes to increase, then we're being successful. We do look at performance. That is a business driver. As far as hard metrics, we look at performance and response times -- those do translate into more business.

2008 INITIATIVES

Performance Initiatives

Our major projects for 2007 will carry through next year.

We also are moving our production data center to Chicago and disaster recovery to Atlanta. It will just make connecting to us much easier for our customers.

TOP 3 CURRENT PROJECTS

Clearing Initiative

We announced in April that we are forming new clearinghouses in Europe and the U.S. They will share technology platforms. Right now, we are getting our clearing systems ready to be the enablers for those clearinghouses. There are multiple projects under that. We need to add functionality, integration, scalability and performance to get those systems ready.

Boost Performance and Throughput

Over the past two years, we have improved our platform. Our average response time two years ago was 600 milliseconds (ms). Today, it's 28 ms. We just launched a new trading engine, and we're rolling it out slowly. That will get us down to sub-10 ms. Another key metric is how consistent are you; we measure that by outliers. Now our longest time is 900 ms -- that's about 1 second. With 50 ms to 100 ms, it will be much more consistent.

Extend Options Capability

We're going to add much more capability in the way of options, including a new trading engine to improve our capacity for options. We are going through the design now. It will be a phased delivery -- some later this year, the remainder next year.