SST Awards 2018: Best Infrastructure Provider to the Sell Side—Avelacom

Initially, Avelacom’s only offering was low-latency connectivity between Russia and Europe, although it has since extended its reach and built more networks from Europe to Asia and the Middle East. “We have been in the market for almost 12 years,” explains Avelacom’s global marketing manager, Alina Karpichenko. “We grew out of a pure telecom provider in Eastern Europe and the Russian CIS countries where we served enterprise customers and telecom carriers that wanted to use different kinds of services. Four years ago, we entered the low-latency game—that is how we began providing services to the capital markets.”

The Russian company also offers co-location, server and hardware leasing, low-latency market data, order routing, and financial cloud services, and has its own fiber network to deliver those services.   

Compared to some of its larger, better-established competitors, Avelacom takes a boutique approach with respect to servicing customers. “From what I see, our competitors are pretty much happy with their niche, and are relaxed in all aspects—in terms of sales, customer support and so on,” Karpichenko says. “But we see an opportunity in terms of giving customers what they are missing with the old-style providers. So we are much more aggressive in terms of sales and customer support.”    

Avelacom has more than 40 points of presence across EMEA, Asia-Pacific and North America. The company’s offering includes field-programmable gate array-based switches and 100–400 Gbps dense wavelength division multiplexing technology. It is an authorized vendor for a number of the world’s exchanges and counts the Australian Securities Exchange, Borsa Istanbul, CME Group, Dubai Gold & Commodities Exchange and Singapore Exchange among its clients. 

Avelacom is now moving to offer its clients a one-stop-shop solution, according to the firm. “Our strategy is to provide clients with a vertical solution—not just connectivity, but connectivity plus managed services,” Karpichenko explains. “For example, let’s say the customer wants to try a new market, but they don’t want to invest in infrastructure. We can offer them ready-to-go infrastructure like hardware and connectivity at the exchanges, so that they can just load their trading strategy and see if it works out in three or four months.”