GLOBAL BROKERAGE’S IMPRESSIVE INTERNATIONAL GROWTH IS SUPPORTED BY BSO’S TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIVITY

CLIENT PROFILE

BSO’s brokerage client aims to be ultra-competitive without compromising on the delivery of first-class trading functionality, marker reach, depths of liquidity, speed of execution and robust IT scalability.

A core component of the fully-regulated CFDs and Forex online platform’s growth strategy is its commitment to investing in technology and enabling the company to innovative rapidly. As a result, in a short time its customer footprint has expanded across numerous countries spanning five continents.

OVERVIEW AND OBJECTIVES

To maintain its competitive position and leading reputation in the financial marketplace, our client is constantly enhancing its investment platform to pre-empt its customers’ needs. The organisation’s network infrastructure is a critical part of this process. They built a reputation for low latency trade execution and the performance of its systems, and as a result the company has seen rapid growth compared to other providers in the industry.

Our client regularly assesses the latencies of its global network to ensure the best possible service for customers – an ongoing initiative that led the IT team to identify two existing locations that would benefit from improved transatlantic latencies and data centre consolidation – New York and London.

The client laid out a number of specific project requirements for BSO’s team to address:

• The delivery of a highly-integrated, ultra-low latency network service.

• The lowest possible latency across the Atlantic.

• Migration of data centre services using a provider that was familiar with NY4 and LD4 data centres.

• Simplified network management for the long-term.

• Complete project management during the procurement and consolidation process.

CHALLENGES

Like any successful IT project, our client had a set of challenges. For example, prior to working with BSO, they had built an impressive IT environment using servers from numerous technology providers across multiple racks. As a result, non-essential maintenance would prove more time-consuming than a consolidated, more integrated design.

Their CEO said,

“Similarly to our own clients, simplicity and performance are extremely important for us. Any network service we use must support our value proposition – lightning quick trades and execution. That is why we are continually searching for ways to improve the technology we utilise. The team at BSO shares a similar focus on proactively enhancing their services, rather than waiting for customers to demand a change. We felt BSO was the perfect match.”

THE SOLUTION

BSO’s knowledge and expertise of financial connectivity proved to be one of the main reasons why our client selected us as their network provider, however they noted that it was really BSO’s latencies that stood out.

Once BSO was on-board, the company designed a financially-sensitive migration process, complete with realistic timeframes, to consolidate the organisation’s data centre infrastructure into one, easy-to-manage location in both New York and London. Their CEO continued, “Servers, switches, firewalls – BSO supports us with each aspect of our hosted infrastructure. Working with the team has been an extremely smooth process and we can now ensure our Transatlantic network performs even better.”

From a network perspective, BSO leveraged its experience of delivering connectivity between financial markets to double our client’s IP Transit capacity in London and increased New York’s capacity five-times. Benefits so far have included improved reliability, scalability and even stronger network performance.

BSO also implemented a new storage area network in an additional data centre in New York as well as subsequent switching and cross connects.

RESULTS AND NEXT STEPS

Their CEO concluded, “We fully trust BSO and see the company as a close partner we can rely on. The team are always available when we have a query or require a further upgrade to our bandwidth. Every recommendation we receive from BSO is sensitive to our existing IT commitments and our need to remain agile in an extremely competitive marketplace.”

An example of BSO’s proactive approach was demonstrated when our client’s network was approaching maximum capacity. BSO notified the company of impending bandwidth saturation and within four hours of receiving approval, we had upgraded the network.  BSO raised the necessary paperwork retrospectively, which enabled our client to ensure continued service, even while experiencing concentrated period of rapid growth.

Our client’s Global Head of Operations said, “BSO’s service has been exemplary. We no longer require an in-house team for network monitoring and troubleshooting, which in turn has reduced our operating costs. From my perspective BSO has improved how I do my own job, their support has been invaluable.”

He continued, “We have really seen the benefits when we have needed more capacity. The discussions we have had during the network design process have been meaningful, productive and in-line with our business needs. BSO listens to what we need and delivers a highly personalised service. Finally, it is the people at BSO that make the company stand out – they are more personable, down-to-earth and available than most in the industry and when we have issues, everything is managed competently due to their service assurance.”

BSO is currently enhancing our client’s network with virtualised data centre capabilities in New York that will strengthen the network even further.