London Stock Exchange Moves To Linux Platform

The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has begun its delayed move to an open source Linux environment with the migration of its UK cash markets to a Novell SuSE platform.

The new system has been installed by the Sri Lankan developer MilleniumIT, bought by LSE in 2009, and the switch-over has been hailed as the biggest technological change since the introduction of electronic trading in 1986. The move is part of a planned move to Linux to bring the LSE in line with its Toronto exchange parent TMX.

System Will Be Under Close Scrutiny

“Today’s roll-out of Millennium Exchange for our UK cash markets demonstrates our continued commitment to technological innovation in the marketplace,” said Antoine Shagoury, CIO at LSE Group. “We are confident that this new platform will provide our customers with exceptional levels of performance, functionality, and capacity.

“This migration is a crucial step forward in our drive to offer best in class trading services and marks a key milestone in the introduction of tightly integrated transaction technology across our markets,” he added.

The new system replaces the TradElect platform which was written in C# running on Microsoft systems. The platform comprised a .Net architecture running on Windows Server, supported by SQL Server.

TradElect was controversially upgraded by Accenture in 2007 at a cost of £40 million and a one-day outage resulted that caused a furore from LSE’s clients. This has made the  organisation especially  wary of anything similar occurring during the current change-over.

Over the next two years, several more outages occurred. This made a move desirable, but LSE’s messaging latency was falling behind its competitors, forcing a the decision to seek a new platform in 2009.

LSE has been plagued with misfortune. Its Turquoise installation, based on the same MillenniumIT implementation, had teething problems that threatened to delay the TradElect project. The move was then rapidly put on hold last November when a major incident forced the LSE market offline for two hours.

Initially, the “suspicious circumstances” were thought to be a sabotage attempt but the problem was later attributed to human error. However, newspaper reports have claimed that LSE has contacted the Cabinet Office regarding several attempts to attack its network.

Security of exchange systems has been a recent cause for concern following the theft of carbon credits worth £6 million from the European Union’s carbon trading exchange. The Nasdaq OMX has also been under repeated attacks which have led to breaches that are currently under investigation.