Global Asset Manager Selects Wesley Clover Solutions for New Trading Floor
Profile: Global investment manager with US$750B AUM deploys more than 100 IP trading desktops for new headquarters in New York City
This firm is a worldwide leader in asset management with extensive capabilities
in equity, fixed income, hedge funds, private equity and real estate providing
asset management products and services to clients around the world.
Faced with the prospect of moving their headquarters and main trading floor
the company in downtown Manhattan the company was seeking an IP-based communications
platform that could interoperate with their existing Avaya PBX serving
more than 40 offices around the world.
The trading floor is a mix of profiles including traders, portfolio managers, institutional sales and research and support staff. The system needed to support trader ring down circuits, multiple pages of speed dials, coverage and rollover lines as well as allowing users to barge-in on each other’s calls and offer floating answer keys to alert traders to incoming calls on “back pages.’
The company’s business continuity plan requirements also specified the need for a back-up system to be located at their New Jersey offices that would ensure 100% system availability in the event of a primary system failure or power outage at the main location. WCS provided an active-passive system design with resilient user licensing that requires no manual intervention to switch to the back-up system.
The company evaluated two traditional turret systems in addition to Wesley Clover but found the WCS platform to be inherently more scalable, survivable and flexible as well as offering a variety of IP Trading Desktops to suit various user profiles. Demonstrated interoperability with the Avaya PBX via Q.SIG and SIP trunking was another key component to the decision. The company also determined that lifecycle costs for the WCS platform would be approximately 1/3 as expensive when factoring in savings on system cost, space and power savings and the ability to do basic system programming changes with their own staff.
The Voice Communications Platform (VCP) offers an array of more than 500 features, functions and applications, including unified communications/messaging and support for mobile workers in addition to all of the critical trading turret/hoot n holler capabilities the traders need. The system can be integrated with various enterprise applications such as Microsoft Lync, Active Directory, Outlook and SharePoint as well as Blackberry, Android and Apple mobile devices.
The system is scalable to thousands of IP devices in a compact rack-mount system controller that can be deployed in a proprietary appliance or on industry-standard servers. The system is also the first voice communications platform certified to work with VMware virtualization solutions.
