Market Connectivity as a Service?

Lucera Financial Infrastructure and Perseus have teamed to create an on-demand Software Defined Network that allows financial traders to tap into market connectivity on an as-needed basis.

“You don’t need to own to infrastructure or the heavy assets, now you can buy it by the drink,” Perseus CEO Jock Percy told Markets Media. “This is the ‘uberization’ of capital markets connectivity,” he said, referring to the ubiquitous transportation network.

Using the network’s Software as a Service (SaaS) model, Percy said once a customer is on-boarded, he or she can log on via a secure-access portal and connect as they wish, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. This contrasts with legacy connectivity, which entails procuring, setting up and plugging in racks, servers and other physical equipment.

Billed as the first on-demand SDN exclusively for the capital markets industry, the network provides traders with cross-connection points encompassing more than 246 counterparties and 53 co-location centers across 24 cities, 15 countries and six continents. It combines Perseus’s low-latency, global, fiber network with Lucera’s SDN, compacting go-to-market network implementation cycles to no more than two days, or 45 times faster than the industry standard of 90 days.

“Forget about dealing with bandwidth and expensive hardware – a thing of the past,” Lucera CEO Jacob Loveless said in a release. “By creating the world’s largest SDN and devoting it exclusively to the financial markets, we’re game-changing the culture of connectivity that the industry hasn’t seen since the extranet arrived on The Street.”

“Perseus is the ideal partner to make this happen with their unrivaled speed and Points of Presence touching every major financial center across the developed and emerging world,” Loveless continued. “By being faster and more flexible than traditional service providers, SDNs now allow traders to connect to new markets on a customized, pay-as-you go basis.”

Originally published by Terry Flanagan at Markets Media.