Three years ago, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) identified that its data business needed to improve its service offering, so it embarked on a modernisation journey that resulted in the launch of a cloud marketplace.

Speaking on the sidelines of ITWeb’s recent Cloud and Data Centre Summit, Mark Randall, director of Information Services at the JSE, explained that the data business forms a “chunky part” of the exchange’s annual revenues.

He said data is the “life blood” of the trading environment, as traders need to understand the current price, areas of trading activity, loss price and volatility.

“The ability to get data out in real-time, sub-microsecond, to everybody, on an even playing field, is really what the technology is about.”

In addition to this real-time data, the data business provides historic data that clients can use to inform their decisions.

Randall said the exchange has now completed its move of “end of day” data into the cloud, enabling it to improve how it delivers data to clients.

“There were things that we had to invest in to make better – flexibility of data, access to history, better metadata management, being able to serve new use cases.

“In the exchange world, we have data vendors or aggregators that get data from lots of sources and deliver those to end clients; that obviously adds a layer of costs. Sometimes these are offshore players, so they [clients] get charged in dollars (subject to forex fluctuations). Our clients were asking us to provide data in new and different formats and perhaps in different locations, which triggered our data infrastructure modernisation journey.”

As a result of this, the cloud-based marketplace, which was launched in September, is intended to provide a self-service portal for clients to access a catalogue of data from the exchange, identify use cases, as well as enable different users across an organisation to see and access data their colleagues had already bought.

Randall added the marketplace was a move to replace customer interactions that had often involved lengthy manual processes, with something that offered speed and convenience. Currently, the marketplace is aimed at the exchange’s business clients, rather than its retail customers, who, as Randall said, would usually get the data from their brokers or banks.

“Whether there’s a need to expand that into the broader retail market, we’ll consider it over time, but for now we’re looking where the high-volume wholesale delivery is.”

In terms of issues faced in the roll out of the marketplace, Randall said the fast pace of the industry meant it required a technical team that was comfortable with innovating. And, of course, a management team that was comfortable with the funding required.

He identified that there was a need to have conversations to map out how and when revenues from the data sets would exceed the investments needed.

Partner selection was also important, he said, especially as complexities have evolved.

“Ten or 20 years ago, we would have built all of this ourselves…now, finding best-in-class partners in cloud, analytics, marketplace and licensing has really unlocked some of the delivery for us.”

He added that the exchange chose Azure as its preferred cloud partner in the data space.

Looking ahead, Randall said that in the medium-term (18 months), the ambition is to replicate the data and services available on the JSE’s legacy stack onto the cloud stack.

He added that the plans are in place, it now comes down to implementation.

Beyond that, there is potential client demand to provide third-party (non-JSE) data assets through the marketplace, with the benefit to clients that they can get everything from a single provider. This would also offer existing data providers access to the JSE’s market reach, as well as assist others who perhaps don’t know how to monetise their assets.

Randall also sees expansion opportunities in analytics services.

“Traditionally, we’ve been largely a wholesale player in terms of data, but in the same way that we can scale, or create ecosystem-scale, at source, by doing things that are commoditised, we think the same applies for analytics. We’ve done a first version of this with our Equity Market trading members, to roll out an analytics platform for them. We think there’s an opportunity to do that for the portal market.”

He added this has the potential to democratise access to analytics for the market, especially smaller players that wouldn’t have access to the analytics resources that larger rivals do.