Welcome To Our Capital Markets Community Platform

To our fellow capital markets participants,

When NYSE Euronext explains its vision, speak of reinventing what it means to be an exchange. We've seen this reinvention take shape through a variety of initiatives and today you're seeing new fruits of our reinvention here in NYSE Technologies.

With the unveiling of our Capital Markets Community Platform, NYSE Technologies has presented a set of services designed to bring the essential value of an exchange to a new range of our customers' business services. Exchanges occupy a unique role in the industry, facilitating commerce through the brokering of business transactions in a trustworthy, orderly and transparent fashion. Our value lies in the aggregation of community participants in a framework where constituency is carefully maintained and wherein the exchange leverages economies of scale and technological innovation to minimize the friction involved in affecting each transaction. Our mission is to extend that value into further dimensions of the capital markets, and today we've taken a big step forward with the launch of our infrastructure as a service offering, Compute On Demand.

Cloud Computing has captured the world's attention, and we've watched with admiration as the likes of Amazon have brought stunning advancements in the service oriented provisioning of infrastructure and platform services to the market. Recently, we've witnessed telephone companies acquiring the likes of Terremark and Savvis to cement their roles as utility service providers for the masses. It's a field as dynamic and disruptive as you could find and we’re leaping in.

The natural question is – why? What can NYSE Euronext bring to the table, and why should our customers look to us to address their infrastructure needs? Allow us to explain our rationale:

1.  Cloud computing's promise of on-demand service provisioning, economies of scale, and a service-level driven customer experience has intersected with a strategic inflection point in the capital markets. Participants across the industry are driving for more aggressive cost reduction, while seeking to enhance the agility of their enterprises though service-driven technical and business architectures. We believe it's a "right place right time" moment.

2.  Customers further wish to  gain further efficiencies by leveraging the trusted relationships they've already made substantial investments in, and seeking new efficiencies in the orchestration of business with these customers, suppliers and partners. Indeed all businesses must tread carefully given the time and expense, and the pains of failed relationships, inherent in bringing new players into their value chains. In short, relationships matter.

3.  The core technologies underpinning cloud computing are rapidly maturing and supported by a vibrant vendor community focused on the needs of service providers. Accordingly, service providers with a tradition of information technology service operation, a set of business services and content relevant to their market, and an intimate understanding of their customers' needs, are ideally suited to deliver the true promise of cloud computing to their customers. It's not about the technology, it's about the service experience.

The net of it: we believe the time is right for a "community cloud" built for our market, and only ours. The Capital Markets Community Platform offers attributes such as:

• Secure by design: Built with the security requirements of our industry and operated by a trusted business partner they rely on for critical business services
• Service enabled: Designed for simplified, rapid access to the critical business services our customers depend on, from market data and order routing to business applications from execution to analysis and beyond
• Enterprise grade: Customers require solutions that encompass both virtual and non-virtualized resources. We've delivered a platform capable of both, built from the enterprise class vendors and architectures they've learned they can depend on with their critical data and business operations. And we've partnered with the likes of EMC and VMWare to ensure the technologies we leverage will benefit from the tremendous investments they're making in R&D and evolve with the times
• Community driven: Ultimately, our success will be driven not by our ability to deliver a product, but rather by our success in enabling our customers and partners to operate their businesses on this platform. By eliminating further barriers to agile counterparty integration and collaboration, we can unlock new value for our customers in a way commodity computing providers cannot

This is only the beginning. Our roadmap is already brimming with new features, new geographies and new partnerships we're raring to unleash over the coming quarters. We hope you'll join us for the journey and in the process reinvent a bit of the way you operate your business as well.

 

Ken