Indonesia Stock Exchange Halves its Hardware Investment Cost with Red Hat Solution

The Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) was formed following the merger of Jakarta Stock Exchange and Surabaya Stock Exchange in 2007. It is supported by the JATS-NextG securities trading system which lets exchange members trade online from their offices. The IDX IT department includes 45 people who ensure the IT infrastructure runs smoothly.

Reducing the IT total cost of ownership

In realizing its vision to become an acknowledged world-class exchange, and in order to move its business forward, IDX needed a single platform that could help them meet business objectives and support the trading system, market data dissemination and surveillance system. The system should also be fast and provide a clear software roadmap, handle growth, and support both local and overseas business partners.

“We aimed to have a system that could deliver high performance, capacity, and a high level of security. Additionally, it needed to be based on open standards for the operating system, hardware, network, and relational database management system,” said Adikin Basirun, Information Technology and Risk Management Director of IDX.

However, high hardware costs, IT investments, technology adoption, and the lack of trained personnel to support the systems inflicted a high TCO imposed extreme limits on scalability.

Providing flexible and scalable trading system

IDX wanted to find for a less costly, flexible, and less restraining legacy Unix network to keep up with the growth of Indonesian capital market and the increasing volume pf trade orders. It needs to have lower TCO including cost structure, warranty, and support. Since 2008, IDX has been using Red Hat software as a platform for a trading machine, trading gateway, surveillance machine, database engine, reporting, and trading data dissemination.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux at its core, the new solution includes Red Hat® Global Filesystem and Red Hat® ext file system running on HP’s Intel® XeonTM servers. It can also run trading and surveillance system applications.

“The most valuable benefit of the Red Hat solution is the low TCO for hardware investments, which is half that of our previous proprietary solution. The ease of system interaction also enables investors to be more creative in their daily activities,” said Basirun.

IDX also used a Red Hat training group called PT Indolinux Nusantara. Indolinux trained and certified the IDX IT staff so each engineer can find a temporary solution before contacting a service provider.

“The result of a successful project lies in the hands of a well-orchestrated team of skillful individuals. Indolinux help companies to enable, recognize, and certify them. IDX understands that, and empowers team members to support its successful implementation.” said Andre Kusuma, Director of Indolinux.

This solution also helped IDX avoid downtime during trading hours. IDX is migrating its other platforms to run on Red Hat.