NYSE announces financial services cloud

Computerworld - NYSE Euronext's technology division today announced a cloud services offering for the capital markets community, a product it described as the financial services industry's first cloud platform.

NYSE Technologies said its Capital Markets Community Platform was designed to "increase business agility, simplify market access and reduce trading friction by using rapid on-demand computing resources."

The platform will offer a range of cloud-based services that will allow NYSE Euronext's 1,200 broker-dealer clients to purchase the computing power required at a given time so they can focus on their core business strategies rather than complex IT infrastructure design and maintenance.

The Community Platform is in beta testing and is expected to go live July 1. It will offer access to a full range of financial services applications as well as managed services.

NYSE Technologies CEO Stanley Young said the service already has several customers, including Millennium Management, Pico Quantitative Trading, and others he could not make public.

"We are very excited to integrate it into our infrastructure and begin utilizing the efficiencies of cloud computing across our operations," Jarrod Yuster, CEO of Pico Quantitative Trading, said in a statement. "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."

The service will be priced on a standard per-CPU model.

The platform, which resides in a new 100,000-square-foot data center, was built using VMware's vSphere cloud infrastructure management software, vCloud Director and VMware vShield security application, as well as EMC's VNX unified storage arrays, which provide both file- and block-level data through a single interface.

"This platform provides a seamless migration route for them to move their existing applications onto it," Young said. He spoke during a press and analyst conference call today with executives from EMC and its VMware subsidiary.

Traditionally, Fortune 1000 companies, and financial services companies in particular, have shunned the public cloud, fearing that any data in the cloud could not be secured.

When asked to compare NYSE's cloud offering to that of Google's or Amazon's, Young said it should not be considered a public cloud.

"This is about building a community around services that are highly available, highly robust, in an infrastructure that has already been plugged into the global capital market," he said. "We're catering to a different need. There will always be a need for public clouds, private clouds and community clouds. We're one facet of that."

He added, "I could envision a day when we'd plug this into public clouds to consume their services, but we'd provide an aggregation layer on behalf of our community members to get them into other cloud service providers."