BT today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire IP Trade SA, a provider of unified communications and collaboration solutions for trading floor environments and command-and-control dispatch centres.
Completion of the deal is subject to certain conditions, including regulatory clearance, and is expected to complete in the first quarter of 2017.
The acquisition is underpinned by BT’s Cloud of Clouds portfolio strategy and underlines its continued investment in voice trading and turret solutions. Customers will benefit from optimised cost of ownership, flexible cloud-based deployment options and operational agility. They will be better able to meet demanding regulatory compliance obligations, use proactive surveillance solutions to prevent market abuse, and improve collaboration between customers, colleagues and trading partners.
Customers in the global finance and command-and-control markets collaborate across a complex web of IT, streaming media, and telecoms. Like all industries, they need to reduce costs and complexity. They want to integrate their enterprise systems with their trading floor IT and combine cloud with on-premise solutions in the way that suits them best. The acquisition of IP Trade SA will improve BT customers’ ability to trade and control from the widest possible range of devices, including dedicated desktop devices (turrets), software clients and regular office phones.
Luis Alvarez, CEO Global Services BT, said: “Our customers will appreciate the way we will bring together BT’s Cloud of Clouds portfolio strategy, products and expertise, managed services capability and global reach with IP Trade’s open software platform and range of devices and applications. We are fully committed to maintaining and supporting our existing customers through delivery of BT’s own and IP Trade solutions against our product roadmap. This is all about giving customers the best possible choices and flexibility on a global scale.”
Jean-Francois Geys, CEO, IP Trade, said: “We look forward to combining our technology and agility with BT’s global reach, sector expertise and cloud capabilities. Thanks to this combination, customers in the global finance and command-and-control markets will benefit from optimised global solutions that meet their needs today and into the future.”