JSE provides Orion timeline

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 20 Jul 2007

The JSE Securities Exchange will go live with a new agricultural derivates market trading and clearing solution on 15 October. The bourse will activate a similar solution for the equity derivatives market on 12 November.

The implementation is collectively known as "Release C" of Project Orion, a 27-month R200 million-plus scheme to replace the majority of the JSE's legacy IT systems and infrastructure.

JSE COO Leanne Parsons says implementation began in April with "Release A".

"We have chatted to our market participants to see if they are comfortable with the dates that we are putting on the table and they look reasonably comfortable with them," Parsons says. "'Release B' is due for next year and we will release those dates in a couple of months' time.".

In a notice to the market yesterday, the JSE said timelines envisaged "to implement this project successfully, within the resource and time constraints faced by all stakeholders, will require a high degree of commitment and effort from all concerned".

"The JSE has taken into consideration comments from stakeholders with regard to the time required for successful conformance testing and user acceptance testing. In addition, the JSE will cater for at least three market-facing dress rehearsals per market prior to go-live," the notice adds.

Parallel testing

"In the run-up to go-live, the JSE will conduct parallel testing in the pre-production environment, which will involve the daily importing of production transaction data and subsequent end of day operations. Customer involvement in this critical process will be communicated in due course," the bourse says.

The timeline also provides for two contingency go-live dates per market. The announcement added the "entire timeline is dependent on the JSE being satisfied with the testing results achieved throughout the various phases".

Security & Trading Technology developed the technology underlying "Release C", says Parsons. She adds that the South African company has been in the market since 1985. The main reason for the upgrade "is providing more sustainable, flexible systems on a new architecture". The technology is Microsoft-based.

Commenting on the new technology's capabilities, Parsons adds "it's going to be easily scalable". She says the current system has quite a lot of built-in limitations. It also does not have an automatic fall-over mechanism in hot mode.

"So it's going to give us a lot of business capabilities and we'll be able to add new products and capabilities more easily. It will give us technical recoverability on a much faster basis because we are able to run it in a high availability mode."