London Stock Exchange: Data Warehouse

Roughly 40 percent of the London Stock Exchange's revenues are generated by sales of real-time information about stock prices and movements. The Exchange and Accenture teamed to create a corporate data warehouse on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, enabling the Exchange to broaden the range of the information it provides and offer the market much richer real-time data sets. Now, instead of investing in "big iron," the Exchange is rapidly building value with new e-business applications.

The Exchange is Europe's leading equities exchange and one of the largest exchanges in the world, with more than £5.6 trillion of transactions each year. Established as a regulated exchange in 1801, it plays a vital role in positioning London as a major financial center and lists more than 2,800 securities, both UK and international.

In its quest to create value for shareholders, the Exchange consistently looks to increase the reach and scale of its business and to extend its service offerings. Investing in visionary technologies is central to that goal.

Around 40 percent of the Exchange's revenues are generated by sales of real-time information about stock prices and movements, which is highly prized in the market. The goal of the Exchange is to broaden the content of the information it provides and offer the market much richer real-time data sets. "The strategy behind our corporate data warehouse project was, in part, to make the data calculation central," explains Exchange Chief Information Officer David Lester. "We want to give authoritative, real-time content, to enrich our feeds and make them superior to anyone else's."

In order to achieve its goal, the Exchange teamed with Accenture to build a reliable state-of-the-art delivery architecture. The Accenture architecture had to be flexible enough to meet the needs of the markets that the Exchange serves, and scalable enough to cope with the information generated from rapidly expanding trading volumes.

The Exchange's requirements were challenging. "The Exchange systems have to be totally reliable; 100 percent is our target," says Lester. The architecture also had to be robust enough to store considerable amounts of data, and high performing, because the time value of the information at issue is so critical that data has to be delivered with exceptional speed. The delivery platform had to be capable of processing in excess of 500 messages per second, with an average latency of less than half a second.

In addition, the Exchange wanted a solution that could be easily leveraged to position it for success in the value-added data distribution marketplace of the future. John Erik Ellingsen, the Accenture partner who heads the development center at the Exchange, explains: "The Exchange wanted a strategic infrastructure capable of accommodating the delivery of other revenue-generating information products—data mining and historical data, for example—as and when market circumstances demanded."

In partnership with Accenture and Microsoft, the Exchange began building this highly innovative infrastructure in the summer of 2002. At the core is Microsoft Windows Server 2003, which is integrated with the .NET Framework, the newest Microsoft programming model. The server application platform is designed to deliver maximum flexibility and ease of use, as well as significantly reduced operating costs.

At that time, Windows 2003 server was a brand-new technology in pre-release phase. Selecting it as the core platform involved considered risk. However, the Exchange had confidence in Accenture's ability to deliver. They had previously teamed with Accenture on several large infrastructure-related projects, including the replacement of the Exchange's legacy trading systems with SEQUENCE, a top-performing platform for institutional securities trading. In fact, Accenture had worked with the Exchange on much of its technology infrastructure since their partnership began 1993.

Thanks to the experience gained during the development of the Retail Service Provider (RSP) Gateway system and to its successful implementation on Windows 2000 Datacenter Server in mid-2002, the Exchange chose Windows 2003 for this ground-breaking application, which went live in April 2003. "There was a history of successful development projects," explains Accenture's Ellingsen. "That, combined with our strong alliance with Microsoft, gave the Exchange confidence that this would work." David Lester confirms, "Accenture have been a crucial partner. We knew that they could deliver."

Accenture and the Exchange swiftly assembled an integrated project team of professionals skilled in the relevant applications and technologies. Accenture also leveraged their knowledge capital and deep, global resources, as the team set about building a prototype.

One key requirement for the Exchange was speed of delivery, the ability to get to market quickly and start earning revenues ahead of the competition. The Microsoft .NET Framework did not disappoint them.

"We'd used .NET tools on the RSP Gateway project to test our application," says Callum Licence, Accenture's engagement lead on the project. As a result, the team knew the .NET environment and had skills in Microsoft's C# programming language, which offers significantly reduced development times-thus reduced cost of development. "The .NET Framework is a managed code environment, which means the complexities of memory management are left to the operating system and the .NET framework, and that lowers the amount of development and testing you have to do," Licence explains.

Development costs were further reduced by the fact that .NET runs on Intel hardware. "You can go to any hardware vendor and buy standard servers," adds Licence. "What's more, because we were using the .NET Framework, there was less custom build requirement. Windows Server 2003 offers us a lot of facilities out of the box, such as clustering services, which we rely on to make sure the application meets the reliability targets set by the Exchange."

The three-week prototype phase demonstrated that the Exchange's key requirements—low cost of ownership, scalability, resilience, stability and security, functionality (including speed of delivery) and performance-could indeed be fulfilled. "We've really found the C# and .NET framework development tools to be best of breed for us," says Ian Homan, head of technology for the Exchange. "They've given us unprecedented amounts of productivity and enable us to focus less on the plumbing and more on adding value to our business."

Technologies Used
Hardware:
64 bit Itanium 2 servers
32 bit Pentium 4 Xeon with hyper-threading
EVA 2 SAN

Operating System:
32 and 64 bit Windows Server 2003

Software:
64 bit SQL Server 2000 (as database management system)
Visual Studio.NET (development environment)
Microsoft C#
Microsoft Site Server 3.0

The subsequent project phase has involved completion of the design and coding, and both functional and technical testing-a process that, according to all concerned, has underscored the strength of Accenture's alliance with Microsoft.

A 40-strong team of largely Accenture professionals worked on the project. Moreover, one full-time equivalent Microsoft professional was also working on the project at any one time, and more were always available. Licence confirms, "We could always draw on Microsoft when we needed them."

The teamwork involved was amply demonstrated in February 2003, when personnel from the Exchange, Accenture and Microsoft convened at Microsoft's Redmond Enterprise Engineering Center in the United States for an intensive, two-week period of scalability, performance and reliability testing. The Microsoft developers who created Windows were also on hand. "The experience and knowledge we gained here gave us the confidence to move into production," says Licence.

"It's exciting to work with the Exchange because of their visionary approach to the use of technology," says Ellingsen. And Lester confirms that for the Exchange, "the technology is the business." This project is an outstanding example of the Exchange's strengths in the technology area, and of its commitment to excellence in IT.

By building their corporate data warehouse on Windows Server 2003, the Exchange put an end to the cycle of buying more and more "big iron," and redirected investment of time, money and energy in building business value (and revenues) on the robust, scalable, and cost-efficient Microsoft platform.

In cooperation with Accenture, the Exchange looks forward to quickly and effectively delivering value-added business applications that run against the real-time data in its corporate data warehouse.