Capital Markets Datacenter Topology: Velvet Rope and the Boneyard

Global markets are being re-architected. A new recipe is guiding the mixture of hardware, software, people, data – and the services that represent a combination of one or more of these factors: Fewer people—more and more of whom are not full-time employees—with different skills than in the past, managing much more data on hardware that is increasingly located outside company firewalls and on software that is better designed for virtualized environments and enhanced user experiences. If that weren’t enough, this new recipe needs to be assembled at much lower costs for the buyer.

The drivers of this change are all too familiar: Regulation-induced automation—particularly in fixed income and interest rate derivatives markets—cost pressures that those automations cause, plus new governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) requirements, and good old-fashioned disruptive technical innovation.

Nowhere in the capital markets ecosystem can such transformational change be witnessed more profoundly than in datacenters. Like the most advanced computer microchip enlarged to human scale, datacenters represent one of very few places where you can actually see the new rubber hitting the new road. Nowhere else in our business is change quite so tactile.

Yet, as you might expect, the plot is much thicker than that. The action is not in just any datacenter; in fact, most of the action is in very few. In this TABB Group Focus Note, we detail

This TABB Group Focus Note, Capital Markets Datacenter Topology: Velvet Rope and the Boneyard, we detail exactly which datacenters are on the shortlist of premier capital markets hot spots, what that concentration means for trading businesses, and what it signals for the broader datacenter business.