Euronext To Offer Broadband, Proximity Services
From A-Team Group’s Transaction Networks & Technologies, April 2007: Pan-European exchange Euronext is seeking to reinforce its drive towards improved speed, flexibility, capacity and reliability with two new services slated for launch later this year, which it says complement the MiFID related services it announced earlier in 2007. Euronext’s efforts to offer lower latency are consistent with the strategy of exchanges worldwide to maximize the appeal of their liquidity by streamlining access to support increased algorithmic trading activity and soaring market data volumes.
Euronext will from Q3 offer market participants broadband access to both its cash and derivatives markets. Anthony Attia, executive director in charge of market operations for Euronext’s cash markets, says: “For the broadband access we are using the latest Metro Ethernet network links which offer 100 Mbps speed and can be extended. This in itself will provide a faster transmission rate. We will also eliminate some of the equipment on the client side so that the number of boxes in the transmission chain is reduced, which will also speed up transmission times.” Customers will be able to choose whether or not to subscribe to the broadband service, he says: there will be no mandatory migration.
In Q4 Euronext will make available a co-location service to enable participants to locate their servers near the trading engines in the Euronext data centres. With this “proximity hosting” capability Euronext is following in the footsteps of other exchanges and a number of vendor companies – including most prominently BT Radianz, as well as Reuters and Quant House – which already or plan to offer services whereby firms can minimise the transit time between their servers and exchange order books.
“The co-location service will involve us hosting some of the client servers in our centres, close to our trading hosts NSC and Liffe Connect,” says Attia. “All the necessary security and privacy policies will be put in place to ensure complete Chinese walls between clients’ boxes.” The facility will be managed by Atos Euronext Market Solutions, the joint venture company of Euronext and Atos Origin which provides technology to Euronext and to the market more broadly, and is expert in managing data centres, according to Attia. “As we are talking to our clients about the new co-location service, it is clear there is a great deal of interest in it from both the cash and the derivatives sides,” he adds.
In February, Euronext announced three core MiFID-related services to be available from November – a trading algorithm to optimise equity order execution, publication of trading data for all European stocks and ETFs and transaction reporting to the competent Euronext regulators.
