Late 2009 the London Stock Exhange (LSE) bought Sri Lanka based company MilleniumIT to replace the current TradElect system. One of the attractions for the LSE was the technology that MillenniumIT has developed that would increase the number of electronic orders that come in to the LSE from a maximum of 20,000 messages per second currently to over 1m per second as claimed by the Sri Lankan company. The impact of this LSE system migration for the JSE is that contractually the JSE is obligated to also replace the current TradElect system for the Millenium IT system by an April 2011 deadline.
But what is the impact for you and your trading systems? For a large part this depends on the set up of the architecture employed by your software provider, the more back-end and exchange connections are enmeshed with front-end applications, the higher the impact on your systems will be, in the worst case necessitating upgrades and new developments from back-end connections to user applications creating disruptions in the day-to-day running of your business.
One of the main strengths of Nutcracker’s software is the service-oriented architecture used. This means our functionality is packaged as a complete offering of modular services that are interoperable and easily integrate with third party systems. New modules and functionality are easily added without major upsets to the rest of the platform. A high level impact analysis has taught us that there will be minimal disruption to our software as a result of the Millenium IT migration. This is because of our modular architecture as well as of the careful use of FIX within our order routing system. Most of the necessary updates will take place at the server level. Currently work is underway to plan and prepare for the development of the new back end exchange connections to be ready well ahead of the JSE deadline.