The Rising Community Clouds

Early this week NYSE Technologies, the technology and services arm of global exchange operator NYSE Euronext, announced the July launch of the computing-on-demand portion of its Capital Markets Community Platform, which eventually will provide access to the vendor's service portfolio as managed services in a cloud computing environment.

If you've been following my editor letters and columns for the past couple of years, I've been wondering when the market would see such an offering. Last year, Thomson Reuters launched its Elektron hosted market data and trading infrastructure platform. In both cases, the providers are moving clients closer to the vendor's data rather than sending the data to their respective clients over the standard leased line.

The immediate benefit is cost reduction and improved performance. By hosting their systems in one of the vendor’s clouds, clients have easier access to the data and won't have to worry about moving large data sets like the daily trade and quotes (TAQ) figures across the wire and store them locally. This turns massive amounts of capital expenditures into much lower operational expenses.

Other providers of massive amount of data should be following soon. According to NYSE Technologies officials, once they decided to move forward with their plans it took them only six months from the initial talks with their infrastructure partners, such as VMware and EMC, to launch the computing-on-demand offering. However, the officials also say that they expect to roll out the managed services portion sometime in the fourth quarter. If others can duplicate this, the second half of 2012 should see some interesting offerings in this space.

Please share your thoughts. When do you think your organization would adopt such an offering? You can reach me at [email protected]