Interview: Real-Time Infrastructure for Finance from Lucera

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In the financial world, requirements for low latency and the scalability of business infrastructure can be challenging and expensive. Lucera strives to meet these challenges while offering high-performance infrastructure management to financial institutions of all sizes. We sat down with Jacob Loveless, CEO of Lucera, to get a better understanding of his company and its products.

insideBIGDATA: Lucera’s products are aimed at the financial market. What does your technology do for this sector?

Jacob Loveless

Jacob Loveless

Jacob Loveless: Lucera provides on-demand, high-performance infrastructure for financial institutions. We enable them to speed time-to-market, remove their capital expense and reduce operational and regulatory risk with increased scalability. Lucera empowers users with command over their resources, network and critical systems in real-time to explore new markets, test new trading strategies and unlock hidden alpha. Lucera enables users to spin up/spin down dedicated resources with on-demand provisioning anytime from any client device, in minutes not months, for true scalability and flexibility.

insideBIGDATA: Which verticals are you targeting within this market?

Jacob Loveless: The initial target audience was anyone interested in latency, and it turns out everyone is interested.  Lucera now caters to financial institutions, high frequency trading firms, automated trading firms, exchanges and software providers.  We work with financial institutions of all types and sizes unable or unwilling to invest in costly infrastructure, who recognize their need for quality infrastructure – HFT shops, hedge funds, investment banks, and prime brokers among others.

Our client, Wolverine Trading, invests in highly sophisticated low-latency infrastructure, and with us they have been able to come, grow, expand and launch new products. FXone is a completely different type of client wanting flexibility, performance, and our on-demand model. An exchange can (and several do) run on Lucera. We’re also working with a number of software companies who want to host their technology on Lucera to provide software as a service to Wall Street without building the infrastructure themselves.

insideBIGDATA: Can you tell us about your recent product launch?

Jacob Loveless: After a year of operating independently, in mid-February we publicly announced our on-demand infrastructure. We are the only company to offer a month-to-month service with no up-front long-term cost or commitment. This gives our clients scale and freedom, and the performance they’ve come to expect from their infrastructure. Lucera raises the bar for performance, while lowering the barrier to entry. Customers can protect their balance sheet by removing capital expense while having peace of mind with real time transparency and solid infrastructure.

insideBIGDATA: How do you handle the tremendous amounts of data created by the financial markets?

Jacob Loveless: Lucera operates on over 17,000 miles of the fastest private fiber available, and connects New York, London and Chicago with redundant divergent cables (QuantTA and Hibernia). We’re collocated in premiere Equinix datacenters in London (LD4) and New York (NY4), allowing us to transfer, organize, store and replicate critical data around the world in order to meet regulatory requirements and manage exploding message rates.

insideBIGDATA: Can you describe the underlying data analysis technology?

A picture says a thousand words. Please take a look at this Lucera Platform diagram.

Lucera-Stack-300x221

insideBIGDATA: There seems to be a tremendous amount of money to be made by trimming margins in the financial markets. What role will Lucera technology play in making this possible?

This industry has been racing for latency, and no one has really won except hardware vendors. It’s been three years of pain and probably more to come for many. Now, the industry needs technology to be safer, more reliable, and more focused on performance. Lucera is acutely focused on each of these, while finally adding democratization to the world of infrastructure. We allow firms to focus on what really matters – what adds value to their business – while we uncover their operational alpha and decrease latency across the board.

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