InformationWeek

November 10, 1997

Chicago Exchange Goes NT

Key trading apps moved; back-office apps to follow

he Chicago Stock Exchange has become one of the first large financial institutions to move its critical trading applications to Windows NT workstations and servers. The exchange has installed 100 NT workstations and servers running trading applications and plans to move its 250-workstation floor completely to NT next year, says Steve Randich, CIO of the exchange. All remaining back-office applications will be moved from the Exchange's aging Digital Equipment VAXs to NT by the year 2000, he adds.

The exchange opted for NT after scrapping an effort to move from its VAX-based environment to Unix. It had outsourced the Unix development, says Randich, who declines to name the outsourcer. But earlier this year, the Unix development was running 18 months late. It made as much sense to start again as to attempt to save the outsourced development, Randich says. But b y then, "we saw that most of the software suppliers to the project were making plans to move to NT, so we asked ourselves, `Why couldn't we move to NT as well?''' Randich says.

The exchange now runs several applications that have migrated to NT, including Iona Technologies Inc.'s Orbix object broker and Versant's object database. The exchange's workstations and servers come from NT workstation specialist NeTpower Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Price was another reason behind the choice. Randich evaluated Unix offerings from Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. "An HP workstation was going to run about $8,000, while we could get a Windows NT workstation from NeTpower at about half that price,'' he says.

The NT setup has so far proved up to the task, Randich says, surviving October's stock-market sell-off. Trading activity nearly doubled during that period to more than 120,000 shares per day, reaching 1,000 shares a minute at peak times.

The Chicago exchange is an early NT adopter. Peter ffoulke s, a workstation analyst at Dataquest in San Jose, Calif., says Unix is the operating system of choice and Sun a dominant player at nearly all other big financial trading organizations.

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