Wesley Clover Solutions, a leading provider of IP communications solutions for financial trading firms, today announced that Empyrean Capital Partners, LP ("Empyrean Capital"), a multi-disciplinary hedge fund, has installed the financial trading industry's first Mitel Virtual Solutions Communications Director (Virtual MCD) with trading turrets.
As Mitel's exclusive US partner for the capital markets sector, Wesley Clover Solutions enables customers to reap the benefits of voice virtualization across both the trading floor and back office. Virtualization of real time applications, like voice communications, is extremely complex, because of the challenge of overcoming latency. Mitel, in partnership with VMware, has solved the delay issue and offers the industry's first virtualized voice solution.
The IP communications features run as virtual appliances on VMware's vSphereTM 4 virtualization platform. Like any other application, the software can be downloaded onto any data-center server that's running VMware vSphere. Companies realize significant savings with virtualization optimizing server capacity, reducing power and cooling and maintenance costs and eliminating the risk of downtime. Energy demands are reduced by 80% through server consolidation and dynamic management of computer assets providing an 'ultra green' data center.
"With Virtual MCD, we are bringing unprecedented performance, resilience and economies to trading floor voice communications with zero latency" said Chris Corridon, SVP Marketing for Wesley Clover Solutions. He added "by enabling customers to normalize voice communications in their IT environments we give trading floor staff the unique tools, like turrets, that they require to perform at their best."
Empyrean Capital has deployed Virtual MCD on their existing virtualized servers which significantly reduce infrastructure, power and cooling costs while streamlining operational support. The system design enables secure access to communications applications on the corporate network for all employees on their choice of device from any location.
"Leveraging the virtualized environment made it possible to integrate a fully featured voice based service and turret solution into our existing application architecture to provide efficiencies across tthe board in terms of both resources and physical space," said Dennis Samuels, Chief Technology Officer at Empyrean Capital. "Reliable, high-quality voice is a mission-critical application in the trading industry and with the Wesley Clover Solutions virtualized solution we can utilize the resilience and redundancy of virtual machines to ensure high availability for our users."
"By making voice the same as any other application in the data center, we have revolutionized the trading floor," stated Peter Madsen, President and CEO of Wesley Clover Solutions. "The use of turrets in a virtualized environment is something no other trading turret vendor is able to offer. Together, Wesley Clover Solutions and Empyrean Capital have the first trading turret system in the world running on VMware."
"Combining the technology innovation of two market leaders, Mitel and VMware have extended the cost savings and efficiency gains from virtualization to the voice infrastructure. The solution-fully tested and optimized-is the first to make a virtualized voice and unified communications platform a viable option for a wide range of VMware customers, across industry segments," said Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst, The Taneja Group.
The complete solution comprises Mitel Virtual MCD, Mitel 5560 IP Trading Turrets, Mitel 5320 IP Phones, Mitel Unified Communicator Advanced and Mobile and Mitel Border Gateway. Having a single system facilitates communications and collaboration among various departments and ensures staff - from traders to analysts to client relationship managers and executives - are always available irrespective of where they are.