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The New York Stock Exchange and IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced in a conference call today that TradeWorks, a new processing system complete with custom hand-held devices -- all designed and built by IBM -- was up and running on the trade floor.
"The key point is that the NYSE represents the largest application in the world," Mike Gilpin, a Forrester Research analyst, told TechNewsWorld. "It's very high volume, very high value -- it's the kind of software that really relies on critical infrastructure, so it says a lot about IBM's ability. It's a very significant endorsement of IBM's WebSphere platform."
First Outside Company
The NYSE previously had written its own middleware through its Securities Industry Automation Corporation (SIAC) because it had never been able to find commercial products up to the job, Gilpin said.
The new order management and messaging system supports some of the 1.6 billion shares traded daily. Floor brokers, who make transactions for large investors such as mutual funds, now have wireless devices that allow them to track orders, manage paperwork, and buy and sell stocks.
IBM designed devices with screens bigger than those of an average hand-held to make use easier. The NYSE bought 3,000 of the hand-helds, designed by IBM Engineering & Technology Services. It also bought 3,000 custom Linux workstations.
Brokers send and receive an average of 75,000 messages a day -- up 200 percent in the last two years. The 1.6 billion shares traded is up from 1 billion in 2002, the companies said.
IBM labels the system "extreme availability." It comprises WebSphere middleware, DB2 database and Tivoli management software on the back end for the TradeWorks application, which is Java-based. IBM's mainframe zOS sits underneath DB2.
No Room for Error
"The New York Stock Exchange is the financial center of the world. We cannot afford to have anything that cannot stay up," Willy Chiu, IBM vice president of High Performance on Demand Solutions, said in the call. Testing, in which any conceivable problem was considered, took over a year.
"They built the technology for failover in a way to handle all the scenarios they had tested for," Gilpin said. "They found stuff that nobody ever found before that needed fixing. Eventually it will get plugged back into WebSphere."
While most companies do not need the kind of extreme availability and scalability that IBM engineered for the NYSE, other firms will still see some benefit from it.
"It's like a science experiment that proves something," Gilpin said. "It doesn't mean it will happen in your environment, but it shows how far it can be taken, and the benefits eventually trickle down to others."
Today orders and reporting are still running on the NYSE's old system, but
NYSE CTO Roger Burkhardt said in the call that IT personnel are working on
transferring that capability to the new system.
