The days of having a lot of voice-related hardware on a trader’s desk will be gone.įor the last 20 years trader voice was the last bastion of voice technology which had stayed firmly in the 20 th century.
THE LAST BASTION AWARD SOFTWARE
And lastly, we will see most of the trader voice functionality supplied by separate devices, merged into single systems or bundled software applications. Although the trading floors may still be isolated on their own network, the voice components will be consistent with those of the rest of the company to reduce operational overheads caused by having separate support organisations. Trader voice will be offered for a classic infrastructure, but also in hosted and cloud environments. The solutions will allow the flexibility to mix and match ‘best in class’ recording, compliance, IM, video, dial tone, hoot and intercom products. The devices will integrate, in a standards-based way, to meet the ever-increasing regulatory and compliance requirements. So, what does the future look like? Trader voice will be on the device of choice for the traders and back office staff.
This disconnect between the banks’ requirements and the systems they’re using means that massive market disruption is inevitable! Not using the highly-reliable voice and collaboration standards used by the rest of the firm requires an additional layer of support, and causes management, analytics, reporting and compliance headaches. This is one of the biggest frustrations for COOs and CIOs in charge of the trading floors. The reason? These providers offer proprietary solutions which do not integrate with Cisco, or indeed anyone else, forcing the traders to use a completely different system to get the functionality they need. If this firm now wants to build a trading floor using either of the two market leaders for trader voice, they would not be able to use either the Cisco phones or PBX. For example, let’s say a major global financial services company chooses Cisco Systems for enterprise-wide voice, providing the PBX and phones. In most cases their strategic direction for voice cannot be applied to their trader voice environments. Technology and business leaders in the largest global financial services firms feel constrained with the systems they have today. The market disruption is being driven by large financial institutions. The shift from proprietary to standards-based, from hardware-oriented to software-oriented, from expensive to high-value and from closed to the best available technology approach are at the core of the disruption in this last bastion of voice technology – trader voice. Their solutions are proprietary, expensive to maintain, and lacking true open integration, limiting the banks’ ability to pick the best-of-breed products for their user community. The largest vendors in the trader voice market are now in a similar position to IBM in the late 1990s. Today, the trader voice environment is going through a similar disruption. Technology really did disrupt the market. What disrupters like Cisco and Wellfleet provided was faster, standards-based, software-oriented (rather than hardware-oriented) and higher value (i.e. Cisco came along and dramatically reduced IBM’s cash cow by allowing enterprise customers to rid themselves of a hardware-centric, proprietary, single purpose, expensive solution, writes Patrick McCullough.Īt the end of the day, Cisco, along with other tech companies who had the technology to remove this massive proprietary installed base, changed the world of computer connectivity in a revolutionary way. At one time IBM had approximately 35% of its total revenue coming from licenses generated by their networking products.
If you’re old enough to remember IBM being a giant in the computer networking business, you will certainly remember how Cisco disrupted its world. Patrick McCullough is chief executive of Speakerbus
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