NYSE Technologies Launches Capital Markets Cloud Community Platform

The technology arm of NYSE Euronext partnered with EMC and VMware to build the cloud platform, dubbed the Capital Markets Community Platform.

It's no secret that capital markets firms have slow to adopt public cloud technology offerings because of concerns over reliability, security of data and potential headaches from strict industry regulators. Now, however, an industry-specific cloud offering from NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology division of NYSE Euronext, has been launched that might address some of these concerns.

NYSE Technologies, in partnership with EMC and VMware, has launched the first capital markets industry-specific cloud platform, dubbed the Capital Markets Community Platform. The platform is designed to provide rapid provisioning of processing power, access to historical market data and temporary compute capacity for real-time testing, said Stanley Young, CEO of NYSE Technologies, at a press briefing. The enterprise-level platform was developed to address the unique performance and security requirements of financial services firms, according to NYSE Technologies.

Currently, two customers, Pico Quantitative Trading, an an agency-only broker that provides services to multi-asset electronic trading clients, and Millennium Partners, an investment management firm with $10.62 billion in assets under management, are utilizing the cloud community platform. Jarrod Yuster, cofounder and CEO of Pico, says his firm is leveraging the flexible scalability of the cloud platform for back testing of quantitative trading strategies. The platform will go live for other customers on July 1.

The Capital Markets Community Platform will offer a range of cloud-based services that enable customers to easily purchase the computing power required at a given time so they can focus on their core business strategy rather than complex IT infrastructure design and maintenance. It provides direct, on-demand access to the entire NYSE Technologies portfolio of high-performance, low-latency services including Superfeed, the Risk Management Gateway (RMG) and Managed Services Hub, and the global Liquidity Center Network. The cloud platform and all the related services are delivered over SFTI with the scalability of NYSE Technologies' regulated, transparent service model, according to the vendor.

"We began working with VMware and EMC with a goal of creating not only the first cloud-based platform in the financial services industry, but a completely new model in customer service and business empowerment," said Stanley Young, CEO, NYSE Technologies, in a press release. "By leveraging our global reach as a leading exchange operator and technology provider, the cloud is a key component in our effort to create a virtual capital markets community with rapid access to global markets and actionable market information. All of this comes with absolutely no hardware investment, costly infrastructure maintenance or extended time to market for customers, giving them the opportunity to focus on their core business strategies."

NYSE Technologies' cloud community platform uses VMWare's vSphere, VMware vCloud Director and VMware vShield security solutions and EMC VNX series of unified storage platforms leveraging EMC FAST VP and FAST Cache. The Community Platform expedites the creation and launch of new trading strategies and third-party services to the capital markets community through the rapid provisioning of computing power and market data within an ultra flexible, high-performance cloud framework, according to a press release. Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio