Waters Rankings 2020: Best Network Provider—BT Radianz

Mark it six in a row for BT Radianz in the best network provider category at the Waters Rankings.

Yousaf Hafeez, head of business development at BT Radianz, says over the last 12 months the service has connected with all the major public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Alibaba in China. “The reason that is important is that it gives our customers the option of connecting to public clouds, and if they want a hybrid solution—which mixes public and private—we can provide them with that solution,” Hafeez says.  

He says BT has spent a lot of time building ecosystems within datacenters to allow clients to cross-connect to participants in datacenters very quickly. An important differentiator of the service is it lets customers know exactly who they are interconnected to and why.

Michael Woodman, managing director at BT Radianz, says BT is starting to see a problem with a number of clients who are using lots of physical cross-connects within a datacenter to link with other counterparties in the trading cycle, and as a result, very quickly lose track of who they are interconnected with. He says this poses all sorts of risks and increased costs.

“We report to them what services they are consuming over the cross-connect,” he says. “If you compare that to many datacenter providers, they will often simply provide a list of cross-connects and it is difficult to understand what services are being accessed over it.”

In June this year, the Radianz Service celebrated its 20th anniversary. Its customers include market data providers, index providers, brokers, tier-one banks, high-frequency traders, exchanges, and regulators.