Slashdot Mirror
London Stock Exchange To Abandon Windows
BBCWatcher writes "Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that the London Stock Exchange is abandoning its Microsoft Windows-based trading platform: 'Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation had their face slapped this September when the LSE's Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day .... Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect ...'"
It's not Windows vs Linux.
It's TradElect vs MarketPrizm, which happen to run on Windows vs Linux respectively.
TradElect never managed its performance promises, which suggests lies from marketing and / or programmers unable to deliver what they were asked to. Despite what the Linux fanboys love to say, inferior software isn't Windows-only, and does exist on Linux too.
This could easily have been the other way around, ditching Linux and a shit piece of trades software for Windows and a good bit of trades software. The OS is irrelevant here, except to fanboys of either side.
I'm in the industry, so I have a little more background on this. They spent about 40M GBP building the system, and it's only been used for two years. It was (entirely?) outsourced to Accenture. Other reasons why the system sucks: It can only handle about 10,000 orders/second, and has latency numbers that are incredibly high (5 milliseconds+).
Looking at other exchanges, there are trading platforms that have been able to last 10+ years while scaling quite well.
TradElect was/is a project management and technical disaster.
...is just the WRONG platform for this. Stock Exchange, like many transaction based business, needs real time systems and Windows 2003 plus SQL as far I know don't make a RT platform.
Yeah I read those too ;) So windows issue or not, it is a Microsoft problem :
to wit; page 4:
"In the development, roll-out, and implementation processes, Microsoft worked closely with the London Stock Exchange to ensure not only that they understood their immediate requirements, but that the solution fitted their long-term business plans as specified in the TRM project."
and
"Robin Paine, Chief Technical Officer at the Exchange, says: âoeThe London Stock Exchange was looking for a responsive partner to engage across all phases of the Technology Roadmap programme. The collaborative approach Microsoft offered made it an ideal choice."
Any more questions on whether Microsoft was "really" involved? Then go do your own research -- there never was any doubt.
I worked on trading systems at the CBOE for a couple of years and one thing I can say for sure is that the only Microsoft systems there are the front-ends for the traders who insist on Windows. All the back-ends, where the real activity takes place, everything is Linux. So, only the trader GUIs are Windows, and everything else is Linux running on x86 blades - racks and racks of them. We never got a virus or trojan on the trading systems, but we were scrubbing viruses and other malware off the traders' front-ends all the time. Anyway, when I read about the LSE going with a Microsoft solution for their trading infrastructure, I could only shake my head and say "Remember Denver International Airport!"...
I never understood why Microsoft made a specific server for stock exchanges anyways. It sure does e-mail great though.
Mere facts backed up by references are nothing compared to what you want to believe - silence him!
MS used to run lots of ads, including banner ads on slashdot, about how the london stock exchange chose windows over linux... Those ads stopped very quickly when they had the big outage a few months ago.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
In the development, roll-out, and implementation processes, Microsoft worked closely with the London Stock Exchange
davecb5620@gmail.com
MS used to run lots of ads, including banner ads on slashdot, about how the london stock exchange chose windows over linux... Those ads stopped very quickly when they had the big outage a few months ago.
Several European banks had their asses handed back to them, too, last spring for trying to shove their Windows-uberalles ideology into their core activities. For several months it was (maybe still is) practically impossible to do basic banking. People could go into others accounts, money from their own accounts could not be transfered, money could not be paid into their accounts. It was a hardship for many small businesses that were stupid enough to put their business accounts at a bank where ideology trumps technology. When your own customers can't pay you, money becomes a problem. There, too, the problem lay squarely on the attempt to use MS .NET instead of something workable. It's just a half-assed copy of Java locked into one vendor. After the banks getting bad press for weeks, there was a vague statement made about the company that takes care of the network, but not tying that statement to the ongoing outages.
It's not important to laugh at MS for making crap products, it's important to not use them. The problem with MS products has been around as long as the company itself so it's not like so-called technical 'experts' can claim ignorance or any other excuse. Adding the phrase "with a computer" doesn't absolve criminal negligence for recommending MS products.
Technology might be a matter of choice, but as the late US Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, has said, the right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. So, that choice does not include the right to screw things up beyond belief for everyone else. It's not a nameless or faceless "terrorist" group that is costing our businesses, shutting down our infrastructure, tangling our air traffic control, our power grid, our hospitals, or stock exchanges and banks. The people promoting Windows and Microsoft technologies have real names and faces and walk among us every day. Take them out and we've won the first round. Why is the military sitting on its hands here? The damage is easy to add up and it's even easier to remove the cause. A side benefit from the cleanup would be a restoration of the freemarket and the usual subsequent boom of economic activity.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Clever marketing, but irrelevant. As you note - in passing - this is for the information dissemination system, not for the trading system. It's there so people can do non-real-time-critical look-up of past trades. NASDAQ wouldn't trust their trading system to Windows.
Every trade processed in the NASDAQ marketplace goes through the system
Yes, it goes through the Windows stack after it has been processed by the trading system. Which used to run on a POSIX system on MIPS Tandem hardware the year after your MDDS system was installed. I can't find anymore recent info even on the NASDAQ site.
I was just going to post this, but you beat me to it. The NASDAQ Supermontage trading trading system ran on HP Nonstop hardware (which is where the Tandem/MIPS technology ended up) and I believe is now using Itanium. The system is was home grown by NASDAQ and they have a good in house software division. http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=101738 I don't know if that switch actually happened, but claiming NASDAQ trades on Windows is certainly not correct. The marketing was clever enough to fool anyone who would believe Windows can have that sort of performance and uptime ;)
...Airbus's belief that humans cannot react as quickly to dangerous situations as computers and Boeing's belief that computers cannot make judgments as well as humans in dangerous situations.
I used to work for Boeing. Boeing's IT department is a huge fan of Microsoft products (Possibly due to the proximity. Boeing Commercial HQ is just a chair's throw away from Microsoft). Engineering's decision to provide pilots absolute authority over autopilot functions stems in part from their experience in dealing with Microsoft office systems.
MS used to run lots of ads, including banner ads on slashdot, about how the london stock exchange chose windows over linux... Those ads stopped very quickly when they had the big outage a few months ago
Ah, so the MS ad servers were running Windows too?