The London Stock Exchange has agreed a five-year extension of its IT outsourcing contract with Accenture, Finextra reported.

The LSE says the deal – under which Accenture is the main facilities manager for the Exchange’s trading and information systems – continues to “provide flexibility for the Exchange in developing its markets and products in accordance with its stated business strategy”.

Accenture defined a four year technology roadmap to help the London Stock Exchange outperform its competition by replacing incumbent information delivery and electronic order book systems, thereby moving toward high performance business.

The plan was to re-architect the London Stock Exchange’s mission-critical technology to a Microsoft platform. First the exchange’s core trading information dissemination platform was replaced with a system called Infolect. Then its electronic order book (SETS) was replaced with a system called TradElect.

Infolect disseminates approximately 26 million messages per day. TradElect can process more that  5,000 instructions per second. On its first day of operation more that $15 billion in shares was traded. TradElect and Infolect also deliver new products at 25 percent of the cost that would have been incurred in the legacy environment.

“Combined with its low cost flexibility, TradElect allows us to stay ahead of the market and deliver continuous improvement in capacity and latency.” David Lester, chief information officer, London Stock Exchange.

The net annual payment to Accenture under the terms of the agreement for the year ended 31st March 2001 was £13.9 million.

(image credit: jam_90s)