Market Maker Migrates to Exploit Competitive Advantage

Slough, UK, 1st February 2010 – International solutions provider, Logicalis, today announces it has implemented a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) at Winterflood Securities Ltd, an international capital markets firm and leading liquidity provider headquartered in London. This is the first Cisco UCS to be deployed in the UK, and will deliver significant first-mover performance and competitive advantage benefits to Winterflood Securities. 

As a leading electronic market maker in the UK, Winterflood Securities provides coverage of major global markets.  With data connections into each market, the company regularly processes in the order of 250 million market data updates a day with peaks often passing 30,000 updates in a second. 

Winterflood has seen a ten-fold increase in market data volumes through their systems in the past three years and expect this trend to continue.   For Winterflood Securities, the accuracy and ‘speed' of their data processing is intrinsically linked to client and company profitability.

Wayne Davies, manager networks & infrastructure for Winterflood Securities, comments, "The sheer volume of data processed and value transacted makes our IT infrastructure mission critical.  Platform performance, resilience, and stability are essential for our traders, as is the ability to flex and scale according to market requirements.  Implementing solutions to accelerate data processing and both automate and simplify IT operations play an important role in mitigating risk to the business. 

"Engaging Logicalis' consultancy and technical expertise, we undertook due-diligence on a number of market-leading technologies, prioritising space, power and cost as key differentiators.  Cisco's UCS demonstrated significant superiority throughout this process.  Furthermore, Logicalis' product knowledge and close partnership with Cisco negated any implementation risk, allowing us to exploit first-mover advantage for the business and our clients."

"Hardware consolidation will negate server sprawl and physical space required; fewer components and a single management system will dramatically reduce margins for error and maintenance downtime, and applications will be provisioned in minutes rather than days, freeing the IT team to focus on innovation.  From making money to saving money, the benefits of this project will be far-reaching."

For Tom Kelly, managing director of Logicalis UK, bringing Cisco's UCS platform to-market has created significant leading edge opportunities for both Winterflood Securities and Logicalis;

"The accolade of being the first to deploy and utilise the UCS platform is bringing competitive advantage to both organisations.  I have no doubt there will be a succession of companies that, having seen Winterflood Securities take the leap, will be quick to bring forward strategies that seek to overcome both the complexity and cost of operating a data centre, and which enable the business to realise new levels of performance."