JSE double-checks its tech

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 24 May 2007

The JSE Securities Exchange is scrutinising its IT infrastructure to prevent a recurrence of Monday's system failure that closed the market for an hour.

JSE CIO Leanne Parsons says: "Hardware failures can occur in the normal course of any business." The failure was exacerbated by the further failure of a backup firewall.

"This should not have happened and we are assessing whether further fail-safes are required to mitigate this happening again."

Parsons says the incident was "by no means a regular occurrence at the exchange. We do have system fail-safes in place in case of network errors such as this, but in this exceptional circumstance, they were unable to foresee and rectify the problem."

Continuous change

Parsons adds the implementation of Project Orion is proceeding apace. Orion is a 27-month scheme to replace the majority of the JSE's legacy IT systems and infrastructure.

"Release A has been implemented. This involved mostly internal systems for all our reference data, billing, statistics data and calculations, receiving feeds from the various trading platforms, internal system integration and consolidation of databases, with some changes affecting customers who use the end-of-day information, for example trading details, such as newspapers."

She says Release C will be implemented later this year and will replace both the derivatives markets' trading and clearing systems. Release B will be implemented next year and will replace the BDA system and the equities clearing systems, affecting all of the JSE's equity members.

"It also includes a replacement of the JSE's surveillance systems and the implementation of an integrated data warehouse," Parsons says. "With the continuously changing environment impacting this implementation, we are working hard at providing a solution that works for the JSE and its users while ensuring the service delivery to our users is not adversely impacted."

The JSE last month went live with TradElect, the London Stock Exchange's (LSE's) next-generation trading system. The adoption of the system was confirmed in March, when the bourses signed a formal contract extending its technology and business partnership for a further five years. The LSE has supplied the JSE with its trading system on an application service provider basis since May 2002.