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