Top 3 Current Projects

Midpoint Match Facility for Equities Market

Objective:

We intend to launch a midpoint match facility for trading stocks early in the third quarter of this year, to be followed later in the year with a fully quoted equities market.

Technology Infrastructure

Objective:

We're continuing investment in technology infrastructure. This year we have an enterprise storage area network (SAN) project to make our technology environment more efficient and more manageable. We were replicating data on disks all across the environment. We thought a more-efficient way of approaching that was to centralize the storage in a SAN and give all of the different applications or servers access to the centralized SAN.

Virtualization

Objective:

Run multiple virtual servers within a single server. It gives us the ability to distribute the workload in a more- efficient manor across existing servers in the environment without having to add new servers every time we need to run a new application. The idea is cost avoidance in the future. If we can achieve what we'd like to with virtualization, we'll be able to realize a reduction in the number of servers required to run our applications.

2007 Initiatives

International Growth

We've been looking very carefully at international opportunities for the past several years. We're hopeful in being able to launch some international venture.

Market Data

We see that in our industry there is a thirst for data. We're constantly being asked to produce data and volumes of data in different formats. There are many different ways we can make market data available to different constituencies, so we see it as an area of growth for our business.

Vitals

IT Budget:

N/A

Key Technology Management:

• Lawrence Campbell, Chief Technology Officer ,
• Robert Cornish, Technology Infrastructure and Development Officer,
• Jerome Mangano, Technology Operations and Support Officer

Size of Technology Team:

Overall IT staff is 100 employees.

Percent of IT Projects Outsourced:

We follow a rigorous analysis of the best development approach for every project, so this depends on the individual project. We force our own internal development team to bid on every project. We take a hard look at every project to determine whether it's more appropriate to build it in-house, outsource it or acquire an existing software package.

Key Technology Partners:

Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft and OMX.

Success Metrics:

We use traditional metrics to make sure the project was delivered on time and under budget. But the ultimate measure is: Does this project support the business that it was designed to run? Will this improve the level of service that we provide to customers?