Iress, the financial software, services and technology company, has entered into a strategic partnership with Megaport, a global Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) provider, to provide additional connectivity between Iress and all major public cloud service providers (CSPs), including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
The partnership will enable Iress clients to directly access global markets from hosted cloud environments via the IressFeedOS API and to benefit from the high-performance connectivity and rapid onboarding process offered by Megaport’s Software Defined Network (SDN), which will link their CSP of choice with major global financial centres via the Iress infrastructure.
The partnership aims to reduce costs for clients when compared with standard leased lines, and to provide clients the ability to quickly move into new geographies and to scale processing power as needed, through Iress’s end-to-end managed service capabilities. The tie-up is also designed to give clients flexibility and predictable network latency when accessing market data via the cloud, explains Nick Balletta, Megaport’s head of global corporate development.
“We have 250+ cloud on-ramps in 700+ data centres globally, and we’ve built the infrastructure that connects to AWS, Azure, all the major CSPs,” Balletta tells TradingTech Insight. “On top of that physical layer infrastructure, we’ve built a software layer to automate discovery and provisioning. We also provide visibility around latency, so whatever data centre your A-end is, we can tell you where the best latency is based on your cloud provider and where you want to go, and then route it accordingly through software-defined networking (SDN).”
The joint offering is aimed mainly at buy-side quant and proprietary trading firms, says Salloum AbouSaleh, Iress’ managing director, Americas. “These firms are already in the cloud, but they have challenges receiving data from on-prem data centres to the various clouds. Iress’ partnership with Megaport solves those connectivity issues and gives clients the possibility to connect from their cloud to anywhere they want to use their applications; back to the data centre, to their offices, or from cloud to cloud.”
This multi-cloud capability is a key aspect, says Balletta. “Through the Megaport NaaS platform, clients can connect to one of our cloud routers and then we can direct traffic based on their workload and their requirements to Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, or even to private clouds where they might still have legacy, monolith applications sitting in the data centre. This gives them the agile networking they need to be able to interconnect all those different endpoints.”
AbouSaleh adds that the cloud expertise that Megaport brings to the partnership is invaluable. “We originally partnered in August 2021, and it’s been a very successful relationship in terms of responding to clients’ challenges,” he says. “But what became really clear when working with Megaport is that expertise matters. As clients move to the cloud, they find that they often lack expertise around connectivity and receiving data to the cloud. The Megaport expertise is absolutely tremendous and has been very helpful, both to us and to our client base.”
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