The technology fabric for a large segment of today’s financial trading community continues to evolve towards an ‘ecosystem’ of products that are provided by a host of equipment vendors. This trend is expected to gain momentum in the coming years and will profoundly change the landscape of trader voice solutions. Rather than adhere to traditional paradigms that take the form of single vendor solutions, it is crucial for the next generation of trader voice tools to fully embrace new levels of integration and interoperability with equipment from other vendors. In this way, truly best of breed solutions can be achieved for the financial trading community.

New trader voice solutions must meet the demand for commodity based devices that can be delivered individually or as part of a turnkey solution. This solution strategy fundamentally embraces the use of commercial IP-PBX products in order to leverage the best of breed VoIP telephony infrastructures. Inclusion of SIP technology enables a new level of interoperability between trader voice solutions and commercial SIP-enabled IP-PBX products. It also allows trader voice products to be IP-PBX agnostic – operationally independent of any specific IP-PBX. The adoption of SIP technology provides a strategic foundation for future application development. Provisions should be included within new trader voice products to enable presence-aware capabilities in the future. It is also fully anticipated that future instant messaging applications will directly leverage this same SIP infrastructure.

Business expectations are increasingly focused on the ability to view trader voice equipment as a re-deployable commodity that is cost-effective in nature. The business expects to quickly distribute these same assets in response to changing business conditions, and to gain solid leverage from them in support of business continuity planning. The start-up and closure of regional offices can be facilitated through the quick and cost-effective re-deployment of these assets. An appropriate selection of underlying technologies combined with the use of forward-thinking product design techniques can enable the development of trader voice tools that meet these business imperatives.

The future growth and success of today’s financial trading markets is highly dependent on the creation of new tools that can enable the user to realize significant strides in productivity, at a lower cost to the business. It is imperative that such tools are based on strategic technologies that form a flexible foundation for the future. Technologies must be selected in such a manner that future tools can keep pace with ever-increasing expectations and demands from both the user and the business community.

John Young is Chief Technology Officer at Speakerbus, 646-289-4700; email: info@speakerbus.com; web: www.speakerbus.com.