LSE's e-trading platform expanded
The Johannesburg Stock Exchange will move onto the London Stock Exchange's electronic trading service this week after five months of intensive testing.
Under the £11m five-year deal the JSE will rent space on the LSE’s Stock Exchange Electronic Trading Service platform on an application service provider (ASP) model.
The move follows a £12m upgrade of the system last year which tripled its capacity. The LSE uses only 20 per cent of this, and the JSE will take up a further five to seven per cent.
David Lester, chief information officer at the LSE, told vnunet.com that other exchanges are interested and are waiting to see how successful the JSE move will be.
‘We have had a steady stream of enquiries,’ he said. ‘Because it is an ASP business we can tackle the cost issue. On revenue the LSE is the third largest exchange in the world so, when they are looking for a business partner, they look at us. We will take on as many as we can get.’
The LSE will manage everything up to its own network boundary. From there to Johannesburg the JSE has a central network hub managed by South Africa Telecom.
Lester also confirmed that the LSE’s upgrade of Compaq fault tolerant servers and its move to Intel’s 64-bit Itanium processor will not be affected by the merger of Hewlett Packard and Compaq.