Micrososft sweats on TradElect review

Whoa! Run that by me again.

The London Stock Exchange is seriously contemplating scrapping its £40 million TradElect system.

The TradElect switch was flipped amid great fanfare barely two years ago, following a four-year development programme. The system, custom-built by Accenture and Microsoft, runs on HP ProLiant Servers and Microsoft .Net and SQL Server 2000 systems within a Cisco network architecture.

It was designed to keep the Exchange up-to-speed with low latency, high-throughput newcomers like Chi-X and provide a flexible future-proofed platform to deal with the rigours of a post-MiFID trading landscape.

Given the off-the-record briefings emanating from Paternoster Square, it appears the Exchange is softening up the City for a Taurus-style about-turn of spectacular proportions.

Taurus - for those with short memories - was the all-singing, all-dancing predecessor to the Crest settlement system, which was eventually canned in 1993 after years of brutal trench warfare waged by vested interests in the LSE's shareholder base.

If TradElect is scrapped, where will the finger of blame be pointed this time? The Accenture and Microsoft account managers at the LSE must be feeling pretty uncomfortable right now.