The launch of the Micro OneBox, touted as the ‘world’s smallest’ trader voice communications platform or turret by Speakerbus, a specialist provider of critical voice collaboration solutions for global financial markets, further highlights just how technological innovation is progressing. And, anything that reduces costs for trading shops and barriers to entry must surely be viewed positively.
Trading turrets or dealer boards are specialized telephony key systems that are generally used by financial traders on their trading desks. And, some of these systems can be large, hardly cheap to buy and take days or weeks to install, deploy and connect their cables to computer racks. IPC, Etrali and BT are leading system vendors in this market today with significant market shares in the US and Europe.
The new Micro OneBox, which is the latest offering in the Speakerbus family of ‘OneBox Appliance’ solutions that were first launched in 2012, is about the size of a large paperback and takes a just a few hours to install before you are up and running.
The Micro OneBox trader voice communications platform. (Source: Speakerbus/Moonlight Media).
It’s all a far cry from when I saw a trading turret unveiled a few years ago by one leading vendor at a lavish launch in The City of London. And, while this latest innovation might not exactly be a case of Moore’s Law, it does reflect an ever-increasing commoditization of technology - even on the trading floor.
The Speakerbus portfolio has several ‘right-size’ appliances, each designed to fit different organisations’ specific needs. They are used by asset management firms, brokerages, global investment banks and commodity trading firms across Europe, Middle East, North America and Asia.
While the vast bulk of trading volume is now executed through electronic trading platform - often at mind blowing speeds down at the milli- and micro-second levels - phone trading persists and trading turrets are a common sight on the trading desks of investment banks.
But voice trading still has validity and has a place in the trading landscape. Some systems allow users to have access to forty or more lines to counterparties.
Recent industry figures have indicated that there are over 200,000 turret systems in the global financial markets with the number being stable and in certain territories growing. North America accounted for c.60% the IP turret market, while around 30% of the market is in Europe with London representing the largest portion, and the remaining 10% in other territories.
‘Out-of-the-Box’ Solution
The Micro OneBox developed by privately-owned Speakerbus, which has over 250 of the world's leading financial institutions using its telephony, intercom, speaker and connectivity solutions and serves over 50,000 users in more than sixty countries, is an ‘out-of-the-box’ pre-configured hardware and software appliance. Their client list spans the largest global financial institutions to some of the most critical command and control (C2) sectors in Europe and North America.
The compact solution is touted as helping financial institutions to “substantially reduce IT operational costs”, by dramatically reducing the deployment time for trader voice capabilities - from several weeks to just a few hours.
The firm, which was established in 1984, stresses that it is “ideal” for firms seeking to update and deploy critical voice communications, but who want to have a minimal impact on their existing infrastructure. The platform can also be used by remote offices.
Patrick McCullough, who was appointed CEO of Speakerbus just this October after working for CafeX Communications where he served as Senior V-P of Global Sales and Operations, commenting in the wake of the development says: “We’re a very customer-driven business and users have been asking for ‘faster, better, smaller’. As such the Micro OneBox was built in response to these requests. Until now new application configuration projects have been labour-intensive, time-consuming and expensive.”
The US-based executive, who has also worked for major companies including Cisco and Avaya has over 25 years of experience in senior management positions in London, New York and Paris, adds: “Micro OneBox is a major change from traditional technologies: we developed the platform to provide financial institutions with a fast, simple and effective way to address these issues by making the ‘roll-out’ of essential trader voice functionality quick, easy and much more cost-effective.”
The Micro OneBox allows firms to start making money within a fraction of the time it generally takes to complete a traditional installation and go-live. The vendor supports every layer of the solution - from hardware to software - providing a streamlined and efficient support service.
By outsourcing server hardware, licensing and software configuration responsibilities to Speakerbus, IT staff at trading firms can focus on value-added activities and the business can expand to new markets more easily and quickly. Financial institutions of all sizes can take advantage of this efficient method of trader voice service delivery across existing and new sites.
The solution itself, which is based on Microsoft ‘Hyper-V’ virtualisation support and was around 2 months in development with one developer and one QA staff member working on the project, helps to decrease IT operational costs with a simplified installation process, which requires no specialist skills for implementation or maintenance. The solution is designed to fit into complex surrounding systems with ease, facilitating quicker time-to-market.
The Analyst’s View
Rik Turner, a senior analyst at research firm Ovum on the Infrastructure Solutions team and who wrote the above mentioned paper referring to the size of the IP turret systems market, says: “The fundamental shift in the trading turret market is away from dedicated (and expensive) turret switches from the likes of IPC, BT and Etrali.”
He adds: “The IP-enablement of voice communications, and even more the development of the SIP protocol, has led a number of smaller turret vendors to offer devices that can attach to a standard IP-PBX from the likes of Cisco and Avaya, which all banks will have for their employees not located on the trading floor, yet deliver the specialist functionality turrets require vis-à-vis standard desk phones.”
This includes things like having multiple lines attached to them, including dedicated ‘private lines’ that do not even require the user to dial their interlocutor’s number.
Turner, a British-based analyst who focuses primarily as an analyst at Ovum on IT security, adds further: “In this environment, companies like Speakerbus, which has a background in ‘hoot ‘n holler’ devices, are starting to challenge the incumbent providers, offering trading floors a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with equivalent functionality.”
The Client View
As to the user experience, one Speakerbus trading client who has already installed the solution but declined to be named reveals: “We were looking for a trader voice solution for a number of regional locations. Trading is the core of our business and it was key that we were operational as soon as possible.”
They add: “The Micro OneBox enabled us to deliver a trading solution to the business in a far shorter timeframe than previously possible, with far less operational overhead and at a significantly reduced cost of ownership than we had originally planned.”
But of course, with the leading incumbent players in the trading turret business like IPC, BT and Etrali having the lion’s share of the overall market it’s unlikely that Speakerbus will have things entirely its own way. Still, this latest innovation can be applauded.
