Elysium Technology Group Moves Software to “The Cloud”
Elysium Technology Group (ETG) completed the next evolutionary step in software architecture by moving away from common co-location hosted solutions to a true cloud environment leveraging Amazon EC2. The groundwork began in 2011 when ETG needed to quickly respond to significant product usage that resulted in exponential growth in transaction volumes in a very short period. Now all clients are experiencing the new cloud environment and advantages such as scalability, rapid failover, cost savings and a nimble development environment are changing the way ETG conducts business and earns new clients.
FX Mission Control, ETG’s flagship application and 100% cloud-based, provides a venue neutral ticking dashboard for the monitoring of live positions, trades, credit, reconciliation and P&L across multiple prime brokers and execution platforms. Lee Ratner, Managing Director, Cantor Fitzgerald commented,
“It [FX Mission Control] is the center of our universe, our central nervous system for our business. We use it to distribute trades to prime brokers, internal accounting systems and to monitor live credit and risk.”
Previously, clients’ increased volume forecasts resulted in significant human capital as it often took several weeks to order, stage and install new hardware. Overly aggressive forecasts resulted in expensive hardware that lay idle. Thanks to the processing power and on-demand capabilities of “the Cloud”, ETG provides necessary CPU and disc space for anticipated business spikes in less than five hours. ETG cut hosting and operational costs and immediately improved efficiency.
“Latency in post-trade capture was our concern in moving to the cloud, since everything is internet-based instead of direct cross-connects,” said Mark Rosenfeld, CTO of ETG. Through smart development, implementing the latest in web and database technologies, and building custom APIs, ETG achieved real-time trade capture and reporting that is within acceptable latency tolerances of milliseconds from point of capture to entry into the MPTracker database. “This is truly revolutionary and we are on the forefront of what will become the norm in years to come”.
Exceptional products and bespoke client solutions are the pillars of ETG’s growing client base. “We heard about ETG’s excellent customer responsiveness and we knew we needed to partner with them,” said Jackie Schnetzer, VP of Product Development, BGC Partners. ETG tailors FX Mission Control deployment to the client’s connectivity and integration requirements. It provides trade capture from various execution platforms and manual entry, plus complete STP to their prime brokers, administrators and internal downstream systems.