Telecoms company BT is to provide AXE ECN, a new Australian electronic communications network, with connectivity and hosting through the Radianz Proximity Solution for electronic trading access and low-latency market data distribution. This closely follows the news that the New Zealand Exchange (NZX), one of AXE’s backers, has chosen a server solution created by server provider Stratus Technologies and trading software company Trayport to power the ECN’s trade reporting service.
AXE ECN is a joint venture between NZX, Citi, CommSec, Goldman Sachs JBWere, Macquarie Securities and Merrill Lynch. The ECN’s crossing platform is due to start trading in early 2008. Full trading on AXE’s electronic order book and matching engine for securities listed on the Australian Stock Exchange is expected to go live in the third quarter of the year.
Under the agreement with BT, firms that trade on AXE will have the option to host their trading engines at a BT hosting facility to avoid the natural latency that occurs when trading over distance. BT says AXE joins nearly 50 execution venues that are already connected to the Radianz Shared Market Infrastructure.
“Ease of connectivity and a trusted solutions partner are a major factor for us, and BT was the right choice to meet the requirements of our business,” says Greg Yanco, CEO of AXE ECN. “The established Radianz Shared Market Infrastructure provides us with quick and easy access to the global financial community, as well as the benefits it offers for high speed, low latency connectivity," he adds.
Under the deal with Stratus and Trayport, NZX chose the solution for AXE and also replaced the servers driving its own equity trading engine with fault-tolerant Stratus servers. “Our local and global clients rightly expect our services to be unfailing,” says Martyn Bain, IT delivery manager, NZX. “NZX maintains a high business profile and any systems outage could become a news media event, which is a situation we certainly strive to avoid.”
NZX has 12 Stratus ftServer systems supporting the ECN and securities trading applications. Trayport recommended fault-tolerant servers, says Stratus, because of their proven reliability. “Built-in redundancy means that, with the Stratus ftServer system, we need not be concerned with application failover speed and logic,” says NZX’s Bain. “The server essentially manages itself with no extra server management complications and prevents failure from occurring in the first place.”