The solution deployed in the London Stock Exchange consists of unique Microvisibility and low-latency analysis software and services provided by Corvil Ltd, running on top of newly released Application Deployment Engine (ADE) appliances from Cisco Systems, Inc.

The shift to algorithmic trading is one of the most significant developments in the financial services industry over the past decade. In this new world, the likely success of executing a trade is inversely proportional to the latency encountered in the underlying infrastructure. Therefore equity exchanges that offer the lowest latency and ability to handle spikes in trading volume present the most profitable and lowest risk environment for the modern trader.

"To achieve our latency and performance targets for TradElect, we needed network visibility at sub-millisecond granularity." said Robin Paine, CTO of London Stock Exchange. "We use this microvisibility to provision the network for low latency".

The Corvil solution went live with the launch of TradElect on Jun 18th, 2007.

"Algorithmic trading is a very good example of how the capabilities of traditional network measurement and analytics cannot meet the needs of modern applications," said Donal Byrne, CEO of Corvil. "Algorithmic trading environments require end-to-end network latencies of less than 5ms with no packet loss. Packet networks cannot control latency and loss to this level without proper instrumentation and appropriate provisioning of bandwidth and QoS technologies. This is where Corvil provides both the microvisibility and unique understanding of how to achieve these performance targets reliably and efficiently"