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Exacting requirements

Stock Exchanges, and particularly their trading

systems, must be instantly accessible to the brokerage community

whose livelihood depends on them. Fast turnaround for traders clients

is another essential requirement, so these systems are constantly

under review.

The Alberta Stock

Exchange, a recognised leader in automated trading, has

recently outgrown its nine-year-old system and replaced it with ACE

(Alberta Computerized Exchange). The vital components of the new

system include an IBM AS/400 and an IBM RISC System/6000 and IBM s

MQSeries messaging middleware.

According to Jeff Meyer, Director of

Information Services, the Alberta Stock

Exchange: "MQSeries is the glue in our mission-critical

operation. If we do not have a trading system, we do not have a

business. ACE enables brokerage offices to trade remotely and

MQSeries is a ready-made solution for handling very efficiently the

distributed nature of our applications."

The Calgary-based organization - one of four Stock

Exchanges in Canada, the others being in Toronto, Montreal and

Vancouver - provides venture capital for 820 listed companies from a

diverse range of industries. It is also renowned for supporting the

development of emerging businesses.

ACE provides members of the Exchange with a regulated

electronic marketplace for trading securities, stocks, bonds,

warrants and rights. Orders to buy and sell are placed by traders in

brokerage houses. These are then validated and matched by the system.

A complete record of trades and market changes is maintained in a

database for analysis and charging purposes.

Client/server architecture

Meyer explained: "The trading system is based on a

client/server architecture and runs across the AS/400 and RISC

System/6000 here, and 85 OS/2-based PCs and workstations at brokerage

premises in four of the major Canadian cities. Brokers enter their

trades through the workstations, the orders are matched on the RISC

System/6000, and the AS/400 is used as the repository for trading

history.

"MQSeries is running between all those systems, so

all the OS/2 clients are using the middleware to talk to the RISC

System/6000 and that machine is using MQSeries to talk to the AS/400.

We therefore have the AIX and OS/400 versions of the product, while

the PC clients make use of the OS/2 Warp Connect operating system."

"It was reassuring to know that

MQSeries runs on so many platforms. It is important that what EFA

built is highly portable to accommodate the global marketplace."

Jeff Meyer, Director of Information Services at the Alberta

Stock Exchange

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