Wireless Outage Hits NYSE's BBSS

NEW YORK—A glitch hit the New York Stock Exchange's (NYSE's) Broker Booth Support System (BBSS) last Thursday during the middle of the trading day, the exchange confirms.

The glitch affected customer orders from 10:06 a.m. and lasted until 2:15 p.m. that afternoon. The BBSS relays orders and information from a floor broker's wireless handheld device to the NYSE's broker booth system.

The floor traders had to process customers orders manually. However, brokers using proprietary broker booth systems were not affected by the BBSS problem. Exchange officials also say that "all orders routed electronically through the NYSE's CMS (common message switch) and SuperDot as well as the Hybrid Market order routing systems are unaffected," by the glitch.

Officials at the NYSE decline to comment beyond their initial statement. They also decline to explain what affected the BBSS.

In December 2004, NYSE announced it was overhauling its automated system for floor brokers with the help of IBM. Exchange officials wanted at the time to overhaul the decades-old BBSS with an architecture that began with a custom, wireless handheld device for floor brokers—a Java-Linux hardware client for the brokers' clerks who would serve as traffic-cops, directing orders to different brokers and directing information back to customers upstairs. To complete the process, the client devices used by the clerks need to talk to an application server connected to a highly available relational database at the back end.

NYSE officials announced in 2004 that they got what they wanted from IBM in the form of TradeWorks, an upgrade and replacement for the BBSS. It is a new order management and messaging system that works with 3,000 custom, wireless devices from the IBM engineering and technology services group (DWT, Dec. 20, 2004).