International Stock Exchange Improves Performance of Trading Floor Applications

Customer Profile

This International stock exchange is trusted by hundreds of issuers around the world and boasts a market capitalization exceeding tens of billions of dollars. To support its international clientele, the stock exchange product offerings include equities, exchange traded funds, warrants and certificates, bonds, commodities and indices, and derivatives.

As an innovative leader in exchanges, they depend on their technology for processing millions of orders every day and should a disruption occur, the results can be catastrophic. So, it is understandable that they are driven to assure the performance and service delivery of their global enterprise.

The Challenge

This Exchange was experiencing slowdowns and disruptions in several of their business applications, like Web services, Citrix, and backend databases. Simultaneously, issues were impacting the application services used on their trading floor, such as FIX and ITCH. The importance of a properly operating trading floor can’t be understated, where the difference in response time of only milliseconds can mean millions in global currencies.

The IT team had long been strong proponents of performance monitoring tools to help troubleshoot the source of such problems. Their existing tool offered limited application analysis, which while helpful when they first started using it years ago, now lacked depth of analysis, real-time monitoring, and key details to pinpoint the true root cause of these disruptions.

Solution in Action

The Exchange’s IT team recognized that their existing management tools were ineffective in troubleshooting their business and trading application service issues. They needed wire-based traffic to improve visibility and analysis and to reduce mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) for business- disrupting and customer-impacting problems.

After a careful and thorough evaluation, the architecture and engineering team at the Exchange selected and implemented the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform and InfiniStreamNG appliances with Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology for real-time, in-depth, smart data. The members of the architecture and engineering team are leveraging the common user interface in nGeniusONE for smart analytics to seamlessly and contextually go from health status in dashboard views, to service dependency maps, to session analysis and service monitors to precisely pinpoint errors and service disruptions. With highly specialized service monitors, the staff is gaining holistic analysis on all dependencies for a service from the Web front end, to DNS services, to application servers, through to database services, to truly discover where slowdowns are occurring.

The team also selected nGenius Trading Intelligence to operate in combination with nGeniusONE and InfiniStreamNG appliances to give them continuous monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities for the application services used in their trading environment. Engaging in deeper analysis of financial trading and research applications like FIX and ITCH has reduced the time to restore high- quality performance in this customer and revenue impacting portion of their environment.

The Results

The new nGeniusONE platform has given the architecture and engineering team what they needed to identify the source of issues faster than ever! When it comes to financial trading services, time is imperative. Reducing troubleshooting time with in-depth, smart data and holistic, contextual workflows for smart analytics has been crucial in returning quality performance to all their end users. Full visibility and analysis from their data centers or at the trading floor have also benefited overall employee productivity and IT collaboration.

Standardizing on one management platform for all their service assurance needs, for both business and trading application services, reduces costs associated with operating multiple, disjointed tools. Not to mention, improved IT efficiency resulting from managing fewer vendor tools. Time and cost savings in product training, annual maintenance, and periodic product upgrades are all added benefits.