Through a strategic partnership with Tier 3, the enterprise cloud platform company, CFN is extending its existing Alpha Platform™, the company's private cloud for ultra-low-latency market data delivery and trade execution, to enable financial services companies to self-provision an enterprise-grade, virtual private cloud for business-critical applications and services.

The Alpha Platform On-Demand is the first public cloud tailored to global financial markets that is available beyond a single trading venue. CFN's on-demand public cloud services will initially be available in North America across key liquidity venues in the equities, options, futures, derivatives and FX markets. In Q2, the Alpha Platform On-Demand will expand initially into European trading venues with anchors in London and Frankfurt and extend further into the APAC region later in 2012.

To create the Alpha Platform On-Demand cloud, CFN will utilize Tier 3's enterprise cloud platform for secure, enterprise-compliant virtual private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions. This will provide financial markets participants the necessary computing power to run front and back-office solutions ranging from OMS/EMS and risk management to market data management, back-testing, clearing and settlement. Available across exchanges, CFN's cloud services provide clients the ability to maximize their computing resources on-demand, while maintaining high performance, direct market access. The offering will also allow clients to customize solutions to their unique needs, integrating proprietary and best-of-breed trading applications from leading trading applications providers via CFN's Alpha Alliance™.

"Previous generations of public cloud services have been too slow to support high performance electronic trading," said Mark Casey, President and CEO, CFN Services. "Tier 3's innovative cloud services platform improves the performance drag related to virtualization from more re than 25 ppercent to less than 5 percent. Combining this performance with our ultra-low-latency networks, optimized infrastructure, distributed hosting environment and reach to more than 70 trading venues worldwide, brings the agility of public and hybrid cloud services to the global electronic trading community."

The collaboration between CFN and Tier 3 strengthens CFN's existing Alpha Platform cloud capabilities and will expedite the delivery of a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to clients worldwide. The companies' complementary vision is to deliver reliable, on-demand cloud services that empower firms to innovate by integrating private, public and hybrid cloud-based solutions across the entire trading lifecycle.

"Cloud services adoption is set to dramatically accelerate in financial services markets this year. With their existing high performance on-demand services and these new virtual private cloud services leveraging the enterprise-grade capabilities of the Tier 3 platform, CFN is now well poised to lead," said Adam Wray, president and CEO, Tier 3. "This global expansion of CFN's public cloud footprint also marks an important milestone for the Tier 3 Federated Cloud as we grow to Europe and beyond."