BT argues that the latter service is hugely popular with actual traders, since it enables them to find any other Bloomberg user on the network, but is less so with their employees, since their addresses are @bloomberg.net and so are independent of the company they work for.
BT, by contrast, offers the directory for the enterprises themselves to manage, so the namespace is theirs. The issue then becomes whether the additional functionality, such as integration into OMS systems, will be sufficiently compelling for traders to use it over their beloved Bloomberg IM and whether its attractions will outweigh the fact that, by enabling them to be contactable independent of where they are working, they can continue to network with their peers, even if they change employer. If the latter is true, they will have to start relying on LinkedIn or Plaxo to retain all their contacts as they move jobs.
The Radianz network has traditionally been a provider of extranet connectivity between financial market participants, their counterparties and the trading venues for both market data and trade execution information, and is used in both voice and electronic trading environments.
At this year’s Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) show in June, however, BT announced that it has voice-enabled Radianz, calling the service MarketPulse, whereby voice calls can now run across the network alongside data. Radianz has therefore become an alternative to the private voice circuits between counterparties that companies have traditionally taken from the likes of IPC.
As such, BT GFS is merging the two sides of its business, namely the Radianz extranet service for data, acquired from Reuters in 2005, and the Trading Systems business, a longstanding BT unit based on delivering its proprietary turret technology for voice trading to the trading floors of buy- and sells-side customers.
The MarketPulse service is, of course, IP-based, even though the trading turrets at the edge of the network may still be running over TDM links to the turret switch. To enable provisioning of the MarketPulse circuits, therefore, BT has an LDAP directory in its core, with a Web interface so that its enterprise customers can do their own provisioning as new employees or counterparties need voice connectivity over Radianz. BT refers to it as a virtual directory, in that the data in it are owned and managed by the customers, even though the directory itself resides in the service provider’s cloud. It can also link to customers’ own on-premise LDAP directories or their Active Directory server for purposes of access control and identity management, etc.
Down the road, however, BT sees the MarketPulse directory as a rich vein for additional functionality. After all, it enables anyone on MarketPulse to locate anyone else, so it could become a source of information for discovery, particularly if market participants post additional information about individuals such as this person is an expert on Japanese equities or this is our main energy specialist. Equally, the company sees third-party providers of systems such as trade execution platforms and order management embedding the MarketPulse directory (or, more exactly, the ability to access it in the cloud) into their products, enabling users to find one another across Radianz, communicate and enter orders.
