Ian Homan:
The real business of the London Stock Exchange is really, really interesting. First of all you have a business that is over 200 years old.
James Johnston:
What’s very interesting about the Exchange is really what they’ve gone through from moving away from being a regulated monopoly to an organization that has now become a full profit-making organization.
Simon Cartwright:
The Stock Exchange has been situated in central London for the last 200 years and I’m moving to a new building. So the actual initial piece of work was about the building move.
Crawford Del Prete:
You hear about customer flexibility. You hear about customer agility. What does that mean? What it really means if being able to build an IT infrastructure that’s going to better address changes in business conditions. And the faster you can address a change in a business condition, the better off you’re going to be.
Ian Homan:
The new building has been great for us. No doubts about that. It’s an opportunity to really start afresh.
James Johnston:
The network is absolutely critical to the way the Exchange operates.
Ian Homan:
The core infrastructure components that we put in is clearly the network and the servers and LAN on top of that. If we couldn’t eventually put that in place we wouldn’t have an environment that’s really flexible or could take us into the future.
Crawford Del Prete:
Technology agility is being able to again have an IT infrastructure that’s going to be able to match that level of demand.
Ian Homan:
So the first thing for us was right. Let’s get the network right and design around that. And it’s got to be completely resilient.
Simon Cartwright:
They’ve got the conversion story completely. And when I say conversion, I don’t just mean voice and data. We’re talking about telephony here.
James Johnston:
So the idea of deploying an IP telephony network not only enables them to lower the cost per transaction but also provide them with a mechanism to benchmark new technologies they can then take to market to provide an additional channel to market for their market data services.
Ian Homan:
Probably the biggest change for us is the ability to now have “hot-desking”, which is supported by the voice-over IP Cisco telephone systems we’ve deployed. Quite simply, we can now create a virtual team, which we couldn’t have before, and we can actually sit this virtual team in any area of our building without any constraints whatsoever.
Simon Cartwright:
And it fits in pretty nicely with HP’s Enterprise strategy going for it as well, which is pretty key.
Ian Homan:
So certainly layering the network, laying in the servers, laying in the voice-over IP telephone system, putting the integrating messaging in place, allowing people to go and work together has really yielded massive benefits.
Crawford Del Prete:
Viruses are a constant problem and security is a constant problem for CIOs. It’s top of mind. It’s the thing that they’re thinking about more than anything else. Is my environment secure? Is my logical environment secure? Is my IT environment secure? Is my physical environment secure?
Ian Homan:
Security for us clearly is important because we’ve got all this information that changes share prices and effectively changes a company’s capitalization. It’s of critical importance. When “Slammer” actually went off, the net result was - I kept phoning my guys over the weekend. It’s in the news. Everyone’s been watching that globally. And you tell me that you can’t find anything. Everything’s working. The net result is – all the data is kept securely. Everything is locked down. It cannot be compromised.
Crawford Del Prete:
Being able to give your employees access and accessing information to multiple kinds of devices, having web services to be able to present data in different formats intelligently, so if you’re looking at it on your hand-held device – these are the kinds of mobility opportunities that are going to be available to CIOs.
Ian Homan:
The wireless implementation we have here really is first class. We actually have an infrastructure which you ultimately take any form of wireless connection and within the Cisco air cells we have different channels effectively, or different SSIDs which get split out. So therefore guests can come into our building and securely connect straight to the internet. The staff can connect internally, knowing that you actually get routed back in for our DNZ. And the point it comes to our DNZ, we have all our security standards and policies in place ensuring that our security is not compromised.
Crawford Del Prete:
IT Managers and CIOs need to be able to work with partners that understand their business, that are conversant in their business and understand the vocabulary of the problems that they are facing on a daily basis.
Ian Homan:
What we actually do is we enter into partnership and our partners include Cisco and HP. And part of this partnership model is we will create the virtual team with resources spanning different companies, in fact even different continents. If I look at Cisco as an organization clearly they’ve got incredible levels of innovation in networking. No one has ever doubted that. They’ve dominated the network world basically. They’ve done the same on wireless. They’re now doing the same on voice-over IP. I think HP's clearly a phenomenal company. There’s no doubt about that. They’re massively reaching wherever it be, from the manufacture of PCs to implementation services. So they’ve got a phenomenal portfolio.
Simon Cartwright:
The fact of the matter is that the partners need to demonstrate value-add to the end client.
James Johnston:
A good partnership is trust, integrity and a genuine deliverable.
Ian Homan:
When you’ve got three companies together – Cisco, HP and the London Stock Exchange working together in partnership, how can we not hit the mark?
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