DATA POINTS: What’s in NYSE’s Cloud?
June 1, 2011
Dominique Cerutti, President and Deputy CEO of NYSE Euronext, and Stanley Young, chief executive of NYSE Technologies, are headed into the cloud.
But, at Wednesday morning’s announcement of the exchange operator and technology service provider, they were clearly reluctant to attach too many specifics to the launch of the NYSE Technologies’ Capital Markets Community Platform.
Not stated: How many customers it actually has, at launch. How much space is devoted to the servers and related equipment required for the launch, at the Mahwah, N.J., data center where it will be housed. Or, how much will come out of any trading firm, hedge fund or bank’s pocket to use the infrastructure, its apps or its services, out of the box.
Dominique Cerrutti, NYSE Euronext; Stanley Young, NYSE Technologies; Carl Eschenbach, VMware; and Howard Elias, EMC. On screen: Jarrod Yuster, Pico Quantitative Trading.
Here are some data points that were disclosed, as NYSE Euronext, along with VMWare and EMC, launched what Howard Elias, president and chief operating officer of EMC, termed “the first of a wave of special-purpose clouds.”
• Pricing: Contracts will have annual terms. Invoicing will be monthly. Pricing will be based on blocks of central processing units. There will be caps and floors on each level of service provided, with “bursts” in usage allowed, according to Young and Ken Barnes, senior vice president of global platform services, who has bottom line responsibility for the venture.
• Memory: Will be priced out in 12-gigabyte chunks.
• Services: The Superfeed of market data and other services, such as risk management, get added in at existing rates.
• Bandwidth: Comes as part of the package, when operations are housed in one of the cloud’s data centers. Linking to a site means picking and paying for anything from a 1 megabit a second virtual private network connection to a 10 gigabit a second pipe.
• Competitive tack: The NYSE cloud will not try to be “cheap and cheerful,’’ like offerings from Amazon and Google, which are geared to a wide range of different types of users, according to Barnes. The NYSE cloud will compete on reliability, specialized services, security, subject matter expertise and technical expertise, but will have “reasonable pricing,’’ not the lowest on the market.
• Hubs: The first hub will be established at the Mahwah, N.J., data center, opened last year and where all NYSE markets now operate. The second will be the near-mirror center in Basildon, England. After that, “regional points of presence” will be established in Tokyo, Toronto, Chicago and Hong Kong, Barnes said. After that, Frankfurt and Sao Paulo are on the list.
