SCIENCE

NYSE Technologies announced the launch of the financial services industry's first cloud platform, the Capital Markets Community Platform. Designed to increase business agility, simplify market access and reduce trading friction by utilizing rapid on-demand computing resources, this enterprise-level platform was developed in partnership with cloud computing experts VMware /quotes/comstock/13*!vmw/quotes/nls/vmw VMW +1.90% and EMC /quotes/comstock/13*!emc/quotes/nls/emc EMC -0.39% to address the unique performance and security requirements of financial services firms.

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(SM), and the global Liquidity Center Network. The Community Platform and all the related services are delivered over SFTI with the scalability and reliability of NYSE Technologies' regulated, transparent service model.

"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. "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."

Built on a foundation of industry-leading cloud infrastructure and management technologies, including VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Director and VMware vShield security solutions as well as the EMC VNX series of unified storage platforms leveraging EMC FAST VP and FAST Cache, the Capital Markets Community Platform is designed to securely and efficiently process mission-critical financial services tasks. 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.

"VMware is focused on enabling business agility for customers through enterprise hybrid cloud computing," said Carl Eschenbach, Co-President, Customer Operations, VMware. "The new Capital Markets Community Platform from NYSE Technologies demonstrates the future of cloud computing, delivering strong business value to vertical markets through a specialized offering. This groundbreaking service brings on-demand computing to a platform that combines market data, market access and secure financial networks -- with VMware providing the underlying cloud infrastructure platform with built-in security, compliance and high performance. This solution frees NYSE Technologies to focus its resources on building a unique value proposition that helps its capital markets clients develop innovative analytic and trading strategies."

"EMC is pleased to be working with NYSE Technologies in bringing our expertise to bear by helping enable a community cloud platform for their capital markets customers. These customers will gain efficiencies by confidently moving specific workloads to an enterprise-class IT infrastructure built on EMC's industry leading technology that delivers the highest levels of performance and availability," said Howard Elias, EMC's President and Chief Operating Officer, Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services. "Vertical and community clouds that deliver highly specialized services based on industry-specific requirements, exemplified by the new NYSE Technologies Capital Markets Community Platform, represent the next phase of that service innovation."

Expected to go live on July 1, the Community Platform is currently beta testing with several customers, including Pico Quantitative Trading, Millennium Management LLC and others. The platform offers clients of any size and sophistication the opportunity to maximize their computing resources at any time while maintaining low-latency transmissions and global market access with industry-standard security and platform reliability. This fully managed platform can efficiently meet the diverse trading needs of customers of all kinds from broker-dealers and institutional investors to latency-sensitive trading firms anywhere in the world.

"In our business at Pico Trading, technology is critical to our ability to execute our business effectively and help our customers," said Jarrod Yuster, CEO, Pico Quantitative Trading. "NYSE Technologies has developed an industry first with the Capital Markets Community Platform that immediately delivers valuable flexibility and rapid responsiveness in technology management. We are very excited to integrate it into our infrastructure and begin utilizing the efficiencies of cloud computing across our operations."

NYSE Technologies customers will experience the benefits of low-latency, on-demand and self-provisioned computing power with the flexibility, agility and cost savings of a cloud environment. Additionally, the Capital Markets Community Platform will utilize the connectivity of NYSE Technologies' Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI) and the Liquidity Center Network that offers broad connectivity options to key trading locations around the world. Addressing the unique technology demands of the financial services industry, the Community Platform supports the rapidly changing technologies and trading strategies of a range of market participants in a fully hosted environment with complete access to on-demand computing resources, software innovations and global market data.

Michael Versace, Global Risk Research Director, IDC Financial Insights:

"There are many examples of successful shared risk and value models for trade data and analytics, transaction processing, and other utility functions supporting the financial industry globally today. The intersection of these models in financial services with virtualization technologies, and the adoption of a true cloud framework represented in this announcement show a significant potential shift in how buy and sell side firms manage their technology costs and measure performance. With the inherent advantages of scale, time to market and the nature of on-demand shared financial infrastructure services, cloud platforms now offer trading firms a range of new capabilities and efficiencies that should lead to lower costs, more resiliency and broader market access with less complexity. All of this translates into market advantage. If these business services continue to evolve and provide value to the market, which we expect they will, we envision a number of similar partnerships and product opportunities coming to the financial services market over next 6 to 12 months."

Notes to the editor:

Superfeed - Provides microsecond data transmission via the SFTI network between global markets and more than 170 high-speed direct exchange and aggregated vendor feed handlers.

Managed Transactions Hub - fully managed, integrated platform that combines many of NYSE Technologies most advanced connectivity options, order execution services and market information applications over a customized web interface.

Risk Management Gateway - A high throughput, low-latency routing and risk check engine with detailed risk filters and reporting capabilities. It enables broker-dealers to safely provide high performance, direct-market access to their clients while supplying broker-sponsored participants with real time risk-filtered access to all major market centers.

Liquidity Center Network - Global network of transaction infrastructure hubs located in key global trading destinations. Anchored by NYSE Euronext's primary Liquidity Centers in the U.S. and U.K., there will be new centers deployed in Asia, Latin America and other destinations to help customers better access liquidity anywhere in the world.

SFTI - The Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure is a highly resilient, ultra low-latency communications backbone created for the financial industry in 2002 with connectivity to global exchanges, market centers, service providers and over 1,300 market participants.