• Leveraged Zenlayer Cloud Router and Zenlayer Virtual Edge to enable clients in public clouds in China to access real-time trading data from approximately 600 data streams globally.

• Reduced peak-hour latency, jitter, and packet loss when delivering on-demand financial data with Zenlayer Global Accelerator.

• Saved costs and time by provisioning flexible, scalable alternatives to private lines.

About ICE

Industry: Financial services
Company size: 8,500+ employees
Location: Headquartered in U.S. with global operations
What ICE needed: Public cloud connections, data acceleration, latency reduction, stability improvements
Zenlayer services used: Cloud Router, Virtual Edge, Global Accelerator

ICE is a Fortune 500 company and provider of marketplace infrastructure, data services and technology solutions to a broad range of customers including financial institutions, corporations and government entities. ICE operates regulated marketplaces, including the New York Stock Exchange, for the listing, trading and clearing of a broad array of derivatives contracts and financial securities across major asset classes.

ICE’s comprehensive data services offering supports the trading, investment, risk management and connectivity needs of customers around the world and across asset classes. As a leading technology provider for the U.S. residential mortgage industry, ICE Mortgage Technology provides the technology and infrastructure to transform and digitize U.S. residential mortgages, from application and loan origination through to final settlement.

Enabling more clients to access real-time trading data

Data is paramount to the financial industry. For different financial market participants, real-time access to trading data can be critical to making split-second business decisions. To meet these data demands, ICE launched access to the ICE Consolidated Feed over Cloud Connect, which delivers high quality real-time market data pricing to its clients in public cloud environments. The solution connects them to aggregated data comprised of approximately 600 data streams including roughly 300 exchange and over-the-counter (OTC) venues around the world via a fast, secure, and resilient network – ICE Global Network.

ICE Cloud Connect works very well for developed regions with robust infrastructure like the U.S. and Europe. However, clients in emerging markets such as China and Southeast Asia frequently experienced difficulties accessing the network, including latency, stability, and cost. To help ensure a good user experience for clients in emerging markets, ICE decided to leverage Zenlayer’s networking services to extend ICE Cloud Connect in China and other emerging markets in APAC.

Clients can now provision direct connections between their public cloud instances and ICE data sources via Zenlayer Cloud Router. In addition, Zenlayer Virtual Edge provides on-demand, private connections between clients’ data centers or branch offices and ICE.

On-demand access to bulk financial data

ICE collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch ICE Consolidated History, a service that distributes historical tick data via Amazon S3 in order to minimize transmission time for the enormous volumes associated with this data set. Clients around the world can access each trade and quote from global exchanges, OTC brokers, and proprietary data sets, with history spanning 10+ years.

ICE wanted to explore new markets in greater China, but its data source was housed in the eastern United States. Public connectivity performance challenges between mainland China, and the eastern United States resulted in clients in China experiencing network instability, slow retrieval times, and high latency while accessing their purchased data – hurting user experience. ICE needed a secure, high-performance global acceleration solution that could reliably transmit sensitive financial data to clients with low latency.

To overcome this challenge, ICE chose to work with Zenlayer, an AWS-certified technology partner and the leader of edge cloud services in emerging markets. Through Zenlayer Global Accelerator, data requests are now fast-tracked from AWS U.S. East to ICE clients in China with reduced latency, jitter, and packet loss.

Additionally, Zenlayer Global Accelerator gives ICE clients the flexibility to connect directly to their public cloud services, private clouds, and multi-cloud environments for optimal data processing and storage.

“Thanks to Zenlayer, financial service companies in clouds in China now can obtain ICE’s global real-time market data more cost-effectively through Zenlayer’s global acceleration solution, which can help these companies to make more informed investment and risk management decisions.”

Liang Ou, Head of Business Development, ICE Asia Pacific