Earlier this month, Transaction Network Services (TNS) acquired West Highland Support Services, with the aim of enhancing TNS’s services across the entire trading infrastructure stack. According to the company, this strategic move positions TNS as the only Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider offering a vendor-neutral approach to market data application management.
“This is a great fit,” Steven Roe, West Highland’s CEO, tells TradingTech Insight. “Not only does it take our business to a level we never would have reached on our own, it’s also a nice marriage between the services that TNS provides already, and the end-to-end managed services that we offer at West Highland as a one-stop shop for everything needed to acquire, plan, build, operate and manage market data.”
The combined entity will offer a wide range of connectivity, monitoring, and consulting services to a global client base of professional traders, buy- and sell-side institutions, and other financial firms operating in multi-cloud, multi-national regulatory environments.
“An important aspect of TNS’ strategy is remaining agnostic to the market, in the sense that we support all normalised feed providers and market data vendors,” says Rick Gilbody, TNS’ Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Financial Markets. “West Highland has the same approach, and effectively fills a gap in support services for application management. TNS has traditionally operated at the system, network and server level, so it’s almost a perfect handshake between where TNS leaves off and where West Highland picks up and takes over. There’s really no conflict in the services we offer, it’s perfectly complementary.”
The acquisition offers potential for significant cost savings and simplification in market data consumption, a major expenditure area for trading organisations, says Roe. “One of the really nice things about the acquisition is that TNS is taking everything, all the people, all the products, all the services, and all the award-winning software that we’ve created over the years to introduce visibility and cost optimisation to the environment. Things like our data notification manager, web access control manager and intelligent data platform – all key pieces of software that the industry relies on – are now part of the TNS suite of services and products.”
“We plan to keep everything as stable as possible,” adds Gilbody. “There’s going to be very little change from a staff perspective. We’ll ensure that there is complete stability with the client base and then provide any additional support that they need. West Highland was already doing a lot of good things, so we don’t want to make a lot of changes to something that’s working really well.”
Details regarding the financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.
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