London Stock Exchange passes IT upgrade milestone

The London Stock Exchange has hit a key milestone in its four-year IT upgrade programme, unveiling a new version of the system which broadcasts data to its customers.

The Infolect system broadcasts market data, such as share prices, out to 97,000 terminals in 100 countries, sending out 10 million messages per day.

The exchange said Infolect provides "significantly" greater functionality than the previous London Market Information Link system. The new system - built using Microsoft .NET and SQL Server database - has been designed to be backwards compatible with customers' existing systems to minimise impact, it said.

David Lester, CIO at the LSE, told silicon.com one of the key changes was a move from proprietary to commodity hardware. "It's a massive change going from Tandem to commodity hardware running Intel processors. We have to make sure we maintain the reliability - we have to replicate that in a commodity hardware environment," he said.

He added: "The markets are growing faster and faster and we need to be able to scale much more cheaply than we have in the past."

Lester said it would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to double capacity using commodity hardware - compared to millions using proprietary kit.

Infolect is a part of the LSE's 'Technology Roadmap' programme - a four-year trading technology upgrade due for completion in early 2007. The project is the biggest change to its trading systems for 10 years.

Lester added: "We now have 53 out of 62 systems running on the Microsoft environment. This was one of the first mission critical systems to go over. If Infolect doesn't work the market isn't there.

"It's a key milestone three years into four years of work. The last system to go will be the trading platforms in early 2007."

Lester said building the trading platform will be complete by around Christmas, followed by more than a year of testing before it goes live.