Case Studies: Financial Services

NASDAQ, which became the world’s first electronic stock market in 1971, and remains the largest U.S. electronic stock market, is constantly looking for more-efficient ways to serve its members. As the organization prepared to retire its aging large mainframe computers, it deployed Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 on two 4-node clusters to support its Market Data Dissemination System (MDDS). Every trade that is processed in the NASDAQ marketplace goes through the MDDS system, with SQL Server 2005 handling some 5,000 transactions per second at market open. SQL Server 2005 simultaneously handles about 100,000 queries a day, using SQL Server 2005 Snapshot Isolation to support real-time queries against the data without slowing the database. NASDAQ is enjoying a lower total cost of ownership compared to the large mainframe computer system that the SQL Server 2005 deployment has replaced.

As part of its strategy to win more trading business and new customers, the London Stock Exchange needed a scalable, reliable, high-performance stock exchange ticker plant to replace its earlier system. Roughly 40 per cent of the Exchange's revenues are generated by the sale of real-time information about stock prices. Using the Microsoft® .NET Framework in Windows Server® 2003 and the Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database, the new Infolect® system has been built to achieve unprecedented levels of performance, availability, and business agility. Launched in September 2005, it is maintaining the London Stock Exchange’s world-leading service reliability record while reducing latency by a factor of 15. Its successful implementation, with support from Microsoft and Accenture, shows the London Stock Exchange’s leadership in developing next-generation trading systems.

Barclays Capital is one of the stellar success stories in investment banking of recent years. The firm’s projected growth plan required the bank to review its existing fixed-income trading system, to see how it could handle an increasing amount of trading volume. After close consultation with Microsoft® Services, Barclays Capital decided to update its existing trade management system (TMS) system with a solution based on Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005. The new system is designed to process the increased volumes with a much more predictable latency. The Trade and Positioning System (TAPS) solution based on SQL Server 2005 minimises the latency between trade capture and risk updating.

MarketWatch.com, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company, helps more than five million unique visitors a month stay abreast of market conditions with its business and investing news, personal finance information, and analytical tools. The company was using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 database, which had served it well, but needed a solution that would support more than two gigabytes of physical memory. It also wanted to enhance high availability. MarketWatch upgraded to SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), which supports up to 1 terabyte of RAM. The company is evaluating SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring which allows continuous streaming of the transaction log from a source server to a single destination server to provide complete database synchronization. The company develops its own applications using Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Ensuring that monetary transactions go smoothly between banks, financial services firms, and the federal government is a mission-critical responsibility for the Banco Central de Costa Rica (BCCR). For several years, the technology platform that the BCCR used for these tasks ran on a system using 32-bit hardware and software. To improve the overall performance of the system and to prepare for future growth, the BCCR decided to migrate its database servers to a pure 64-bit computing platform that runs on Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition operating system and the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 database. The software, combined with new 64-bit IBM server hardware, is helping the bank improve the performance of financial transactions, increase the reliability of the system, and attain scalability that will enable the transaction system to grow with future demand and new financial services.