Q&A: Chicago exchange CIO says IT helps keep up with rivals

Computerworld - Over the past five years, Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc. (CME) has gone from electronically trading 137,550 futures contracts a day to trading almost 3.15 million contracts per day. During that time, the exchange also went public -- years ahead of rival New York Stock Exchange Inc., which recently announced plans for an initial public stock offering.
Jim Krause, CIO for the CME, spoke recently with Computerworld about what it takes to stay ahead of the IT systems game and how market consolidation will affect future technology deployments.
The NYSE is buying a premier electronic trading platform, Archipelago. Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. is replacing its SuperMontage electronic trading platform with Instinet. How is the CME going to keep up with the other exchanges? You're doing things to constantly improve your technology and improve your response time. One of the challenges is that in an automated environment, let's say you reduce the response time for an order by half. Well, then the next order from an automated trading system is coming to you that much faster, and therefore, it's like your capacity or extra capabilities are used up overnight. I think all the exchanges are experiencing that problem. I think the big issue you'll see with automated trading -- I know Nasdaq has this issue because we've talked to them -- is the proliferation of market data, especially when you start trading options electronically.
One of the big things we've been working on with the other exchanges is developing highly efficient standards and capabilities. ... [That way], you can minimize bandwidth growth impacts and maximize the amount of information going out the door to traders so you can make that as timely as possible. That's one of the things the industry is wrestling with -- how to control the growth of market data. Just like a standard called FIX [Financial Information Exchange] has been developed for order flow in getting orders into and out of systems, there's going to be a standard developed for that market data as well.

With its acquisition of Archipelago Holdings Inc., the NYSE is going public. You went public more than two years ago. How did that affect operations and the use of technology for trading? That's why I'm saying they're all copying us. Going public and having to react to shareholders' concerns, the ability to grow the marketplace, etc. ... has put more demands on IT to deliver functionality and capabilities. I think we met those challenges, though maybe the growth rates could have been