Waters Rankings 2013: Winners' Circle — Building Bridges
How has the year been for IPC so far?
We’ve seen a big growth in our managed services customer base. That’s partly driven by our global network, and we’ve seen a lot of customers come to us because, rather than running their own in-house network or managing carrier relationships themselves, they’ve needed to concentrate on their core business. On top of that, we’ve built a range of services they can take. We have our point-to-point connectivity, there’s the extranet service, Connexus, where they can be routed to any other financial services firm on the network such as liquidity venues, market data providers or independent software vendors, and most recently, virtual private networks. Companies use it to link remote offices together, and we can provide that service for them. It’s really driven the uptake of our managed services, and I think that’s reflected in our winning these awards.
How has moving to a software-based platform for Unigy helped clients since its release?
Unlike previous unified communications systems that have been hardware-based, this is software-based. That gives you much greater flexibility in how you design your trading communications environment, such as having a single platform covering multiple trading floors, located globally. You can build in much greater resilience that way, and being software based, it runs on industry-standard blade servers. A lot of our customers are looking at their datacenter requirements and its associated costs for areas such as cooling, and being able to reduce that is important. Having a single platform helps to reduce support costs, when it can be done from one location, rather than local installs at every datacenter. It’s also much easier to integrate into trading applications, as well as support for multiple devices.
What are the other areas that software-based, single platforms can assist with a firm’s operations?
As an example, for a lot of our customers, particularly those with New York floors, Hurricane Sandy really did force them to rethink their business continuity plans. Until Sandy, the norm was to have datacenters a few miles apart, but since then, they’ve had to revisit their plans to ensure that similar events don’t cause problems. Having a network like ours allows for the flexibility in those scenarios that you need, where you can route to different datacenters as required, and link your traders together.
In terms of your network, have you been looking at enhancing connectivity to new platforms such as swap execution facilities (SEFs) in the US, and have your clients been asking for it?
We work closely with our customers in trying to understand which SEFs to connect to, which are the ones that will be most important to them, and how many they’re going to want to connect to. It’s a market area that is changing, and it’s been waiting a long time for regulation. We’re working with the SEFs as well, but it all comes down to being able to respond quickly to customer requests.
What are the main areas of focus for IPC in the coming months?
We’ll be carrying on what we’re doing. The network award is a great one for us, we’ve put a lot of work into things like embedding sophisticated monitoring tools and we’re constantly investing in it, while designing it for the needs of the financial markets. Most customers don’t necessarily want to share a network with retail, or the health industry, or other types of traffic—they want a dedicated financial network to trust. We’ll also be adding new services, and continuing to roll out Unigy. We’ll be focusing on application adoption with that, as well, along with the expansion of our managed services capabilities in response to client needs.
“Until Hurricane Sandy, the norm was to have datacenters a few miles apart, but since then, they’ve had to revisit their plans to ensure that similar events don’t cause problems. Having a network like ours allows for the flexibility in those scenarios that you need, where you can route to different datacenters as required, and link your traders together.” —Simon Jones, IPC Systems
Only users who have a paid subscription or are part of a corporate subscription are able to print or copy content.
To access these options, along with all other subscription benefits, please contact info@waterstechnology.com or view our subscription options here: http://subscriptions.waterstechnology.com/subscribe
You are currently unable to print this content. Please contact info@waterstechnology.com to find out more.
You are currently unable to copy this content. Please contact info@waterstechnology.com to find out more.
Copyright Infopro Digital Limited. All rights reserved.
You may share this content using our article tools. Printing this content is for the sole use of the Authorised User (named subscriber), as outlined in our terms and conditions - https://www.infopro-insight.com/terms-conditions/insight-subscriptions/
If you would like to purchase additional rights please email info@waterstechnology.com
Copyright Infopro Digital Limited. All rights reserved.
You may share this content using our article tools. Copying this content is for the sole use of the Authorised User (named subscriber), as outlined in our terms and conditions - https://www.infopro-insight.com/terms-conditions/insight-subscriptions/
If you would like to purchase additional rights please email info@waterstechnology.com
More on Awards & Rankings
Witad Awards 2024: Rising star (vendor) – data, engineering & product development—Roberta Bill, SmartStream Technologies
Roberta Bill, product manager at SmartStream Technologies, wins rising star (vendor) – data, engineering & product development, in the 2024 Women in Technology and Data Awards.
Witad Awards 2024: Technology leader of the year (end-user)—Sejal Shah, BNP Paribas India Services
Sejal Shah, director and head of Global Markets IT BNP Paribas India Services, wins technology leader of the year (end-user) in the 2024 Women in Technology and Data Awards.
Witad Awards 2024: Reference data professional of the year (end-user)—Ludmilla Morgunova, BNP Paribas
Ludmilla Morgunova, Java developer on BNP Paribas’ Referential Data Platform, wins reference data professional of the year (end-user) in the 2024 Women in Technology and Data Awards.
Witad Awards 2024: Vendor professional of the year (trading and risk)—Mina Wallace, SS&C Algorithmics
Mina Wallace, general manager and senior vice president of the risk management business unit at SS&C Algorithmics, wins the vendor professional of the year (trading and risk) in the 2024 Women in Technology and Data Awards.
Witad Awards 2024: Above and beyond award (vendor)—Susan Bennett, Tradeweb
Susan Bennett, managing director, global head of product marketing at Tradeweb, wins the above and beyond award (vendor) in the 2024 Women in Technology and Data Awards.
Women in Technology & Data Awards 2024: All the winners and why they won
WatersTechnology honored the winners of the 36 categories in the 2024 Women in Technology & Data Awards, who were announced at a sit-down lunch in London on International Women's Day on March 8.
AFTAs 2023: Best new technology introduced over the last 12 months (data & data services)—SS&C Aloha
Northern Trust: Improving transparency across the asset servicing market
Northern Trust won three categories in the 2023 American Financial Technology Awards. Paul d’Ouville, global head of technology solutions and servicing at Northern Trust, discusses his firm’s fourth consecutive win in the Best reporting initiative…
Most read
- Women in Technology & Data Awards 2024: All the winners and why they won
- Witad Awards 2024: Above and beyond award (vendor)—Susan Bennett, Tradeweb
- Fighting FAIRR: Inside the bill aiming to keep AI and algos honest