The London office is headed by Chris Bates, vice president, IP Trade EMEA, who has joined from BT's Trading Systems division. Dispelling the myth that traders cannot fully embrace VoIP on the trading floor, IP Trade offers the first turret truly conceived for the IP world, bringing many advantages over legacy providers.

Stephen Kimsey, Kimsey Consulting, the marketing and research advisory services consultancy specialising in the global financial, commodities and energy trading and associated technologies sector, said: "There is an increasing acceptance of Voice over IP with almost three quarters of financial institutions now regarding VoIP as a suitable technology solution for the trading floor, compared to around two-thirds in 2006. Increasing acceptance of VoIP is creating new opportunities for the traditional vendors to be challenged by newcomers such as IP Trade with their ability to deliver low cost of ownership, nimble solutions that are easily integrated and rapidly delivered to market, and an innovative approach to unified communications."

According to Kimsey Consulting, 25,000 more trading positions are expected by 2010, and there will be an increase of approximately 2,000 firms participating in the global trading markets. Since the IP Trade solution is inherently integrated into the IP-PBX environment, it offers a simple to manage, cost effective and rapidly expandable trading environment - automatically addressing the need for increased virtualisation and greater agility.

"Prior to IP Trade, only turrets using a proprietary TDM voice switch had been available in the market," said Neil Isaacson, head of products, who also recently joined from BT's Trading Systems division. "IP Trade's technology differs from legacy turret providers because our turret acts as a SIP end point on the prevalent IP PBX manufacturers platforms. Therefore our solution has inherent integration with the enterprise voice and data environments. These factors allow clients to move away from costly hard-wired TDM-based telephony switching to pure IP-based turrets that enable unified communications across the trading enterprise."

Isaacson adds: "As well as the cost savings associated with having a unified communication platform, the IP Trade solution enables trader choices to be driven by business needs rather than integration or implementation issues.

IP Trade can point to successful implementations of its technology across the globe. Trading floor deployments have been rolled out in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Brussels, Luxembourg, as well as in New York, India and Bogotá.