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BT Radianz Introduces MaketPulse VoIP Service
June 16, 2008
BT Radianz, the financial extranet business of U.K.-based BT Group, has unveiled a solution that delivers VoIP, or voice-over-Internet protocol, services to the trading room over the company's connectivity platform.
Dubbed MaketPulse, the service, which debuted Tuesday at the Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association's Technology Management Conference, is based on the session initiation protocol (SIP). BT says MarketPulse lets clients run data, voice and video applications through a single, highly reliable connection.
A customer pilot program is in its final stages and the service will be made available Aug. 1 to investment banks and brokers, said Tim Furmidge, head of product at BT Global Financial Services. The launch is a "very significant" development for BT, said Furmidge, because it is the first time that BT's turret platform has been fully integrated with the Radianz shared market infrastructure.
MarketPulse provides "all the reliability and security and performance of traditional private wires," Furmidge explained, citing the direct, physical point-to-point connections between a broker and its clients.
"The service allows firms to set up their own disaster recovery plans and other scenarios, and also allows them to redirect the connections themselves, and instantly," he noted. "Because it's a VoIP service, it's effectively a virtual private wire within the Radianz shared market infrastructure, so anybody connected to the infrastructure can participate." Another benefit, he added, is that firms can provision their own services to clients: "You can instantly set up a new connection to a new client in the marketplace, whereas with traditional services, it takes a minimum of half a day--or much longer."
BT says that MarketPulse is compatible with all current turret platforms.
"The market has been slow to take up VoIP services for the trading room due to concerns with its quality, reliability and security," said Phil Mottram, BT's managing director of Radianz and trading systems, in a statement.
In October, IPC Systems, a New York-based trading communications technology provider, rolled out Nexus Suite, an SIP-based communications platform similar to BT's MarketPulse. IPC said Nexus Suite links elements of its network services with the IPC Alliance platform to unify communications technology in real time. The platform, said the company, "breaks down traditional technological barriers within a trading organization," enabling traders to "collaborate with peers, counterparties and back-office personnel, switching back and forth seamlessly from one application to another without skipping a beat."
Although VoIP in the trading room has been around for several years, not all financial institutions have made the leap, said Sang Lee, co-founder and managing partner of Boston-based research firm Aite Group. "Combining the strength of IP in the trading room with a robust network backbone can potentially change the market's perception of VoIP and truly increase its adoption," he noted.
