IPC Plans New Remote-Trading Tools

Communications technology provider IPC is working on updates to its turrets to help traders work remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Included in this rollout is a new access option for its private cloud network, Connexus, through a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN).

An SD-WAN is an internet technology that provides a way to optimize virtual private networks (VPNs) and the tunnels, or links, between a trader’s computer and the outside network. It allows users to have more control over performance and bandwidth usage, says Tim Carmody, CTO at IPC.

The device will be shipped to the end-user working in a remote office or at home, who will simply plug it in and turn it on. It is pre-configured to come back to IPC and set tunnels.

“We would set up multiple tunnels so you can have a dedicated tunnel for your trader voice traffic, and then the device would be smart enough to prioritize that traffic so that your kids on the internet are not going to get as much of the bandwidth as you are doing trader-voice over that device,” Carmody says.

He says the best use case for an SD-WAN is if a firm wanted to put a turret in somebody’s house that is a replica of the one sitting on their desk at the office. Carmody says this will allow the trader to have “the same exact user experience” while working remotely.

The vendor has previously used SD-WANs for small branch-office layouts, but now it is productizing it and turning it into a work-from-home model and making it an official access point for Connexus.

“Into Connexus we have secure internet on-ramps for remote access for people that are hosting with us or for other services like that. So this SD-WAN functionality comes in over the internet into our secure on-ramps, and then we manage it from there. And then once that’s on Connexus, we can set up a route to get you to any destination on Connexus,” he says.

IPC is looking at a fourth quarter rollout for this new offering.

Another update from IPC is to take the smaller version of its turret, Unigy Pulse, and make that a device that is more flexible to remote trading.

Unigy Pulse is a lower-cost and more compact device that the vendor has offered for years. Carmody says it is more for users to engage in “intercom- and speaker-type activities,” such as for floor analysts or compliance officers who need to easily connect with traders.

“Historically, it did not have the same kind of capabilities for just making a regular dial-tone call or accessing a private wire directly,” he says. “Some of this was already planned, and some of it is changing, but we are moving into making that more of a full-featured device that does everything a turret does, but on a smaller scale to make it [easier] to bring into somebody’s home. The turret is not big, but it is not tiny, either.”

Carmody says the timeline for the update to Pulse is on a “much longer-term” roadmap because there are hardware changes that have to happen.

“Primarily [it] would be targeted toward somebody who is used to using a turret in their primary office, and either doesn’t like the soft client experience or just wants a hard device at home,” he says.

A third update the firm is working on is for IQ/MAX Omni, a soft client application that replicates or provides similar functionality to a hard turret. Carmody says after the pandemic broke out, Omni was one of the ways in which customers were able to continue to work from home.

“It is actually a solution we have had for in the market for about eight years,” he says. “It is in dire need of a new user interface because it does look a bit tired, but it does what it is supposed [to do]. The reality, though, was that prior to the pandemic, almost none of our customers encouraged or allowed a work-from-home model.

“The Omni soft client was an interesting thing for people,” he continues, “but it was not heavily used because of the trading policies. It was something that some of our customers already had, and certainly something that was available in the market already.”

Omni is not the same as a physical turret. Carmody explains that on a physical turret there are dual handsets, with buttons that can be pushed to talk or mute that are located directly on the handset. There are also typically numerous speakers, with some having as many as 62.

“When you move to a soft client, you wind up with a single handset and a single speaker. [With] that single speaker, you can blend the audio, so if you are listening to eight different speaker channels, you can have them all come out of the one speaker blended, but it is not the same experience,” Carmody says. “You can have one speaker on the left-hand side, and one speaker on the right-hand side for listening to two different conversations, [but] you do not have the same rapidity or speed of being able to move from button to button and call to call because now you are doing it with your mouse as opposed to doing it on a touchscreen where the buttons are easily pressed and easily moved.”

However, he says it does offer many of the same features as a physical turret. Without specifying a timeline, he says IPC plans to make it more suitable for remote working and to provide it with a look more akin to a physical turret. 

“Right now the interface on Omni does not look like a turret in the same way; there is [a] learning curve that people have to go through to move between the two,” he says. “So [we are working to] making it look and feel much more like a turret, making it more supportable on a wider number of platforms—things like running in Citrix or [on a] virtual desktop environment.”