CASE STUDY

I joined the JSE around 14 years ago . Before that I spent over 12 years in software development at Accenture , consulting to the public sector , mining as well as healthcare industries . In my role now , I oversee and manage the delivery of COTS and custom enterprise integration software , as well as the software quality assurance for the organisation .

Since taking over in your role , how have you guided your IT team to put technology at the heart of delivering the business objectives for the JSE ?

Technology is at the heart of any modern exchange . Technology is used as a key differentiator and gives exchanges the edge in a capital market . The industry relies heavily on technology innovation . Moreover , reliability and availability are critical success factors – ask any trader who cannot access a market for more than five minutes due to a technology issue . Markets move rapidly in reaction to events , and the underlying tech must be able to handle that . The exchange has a wide range of applications that need to integrate quickly and reliably . Therefore , my approach has always been to apply good design , tenacious rigour and embed proven technologies into the organisation to achieve our business goals .

Given that the JSE has over 140 disparate data sources across its data landscape and over 120 different applications which need to operate in perfect harmony to ensure that there is accurate settlement and risk , why was it important for the team to implement the Denodo Platform ?

The JSE operates in a broad spectrum of the capital markets infrastructure . Its day-to-day operations involve many core business systems . One of the key functions we provide is a post-trade function within the end-to-end business service , whereby trades that are executed within the various venues are settled centrally . Generally , the post-trade , risk and collateral management aspects of an exchange are offset to other institutions that calculate net position and risk for a particular trading firm . These amounts can quickly run into millions of dollars in this billion-dollar market . The data must be sourced and integrated from various heterogeneous systems including relational databases , flat files , and APIs , to serve the needs of the various areas . Using traditional batch-oriented extract , transform , and load ( ETL ) processes was a cumbersome and inefficient process which has been a typical BI pattern . Additionally , the different versions of data entities across different systems created confusion and scepticism around data authenticity . In a high-speed trading environment , it is imperative to remain 100 % accurate for 100 % of the time , so the JSE needed to look beyond traditional ETL and batch processing tools for data integration and looked for more agile , flexible , and ( near ) real-time data integration tools . This is where the Denodo Platform came in . The JSE now utilises it to enable trades and deals every day in all capital markets .

Since the Denodo Platform implementation , the JSE has eradicated data misinterpretations and reduced duplication . The platform has contributed to the exchange ’ s efforts towards a reliable and trustworthy market infrastructure . Having a single version of the source data has helped avoid the pitfalls of inaccurate derived data , where incorrect calculations and closing balances were commonplace . The JSE has been able to provide 100 % accurate data , 100 % of the time for various functions , particularly for post-trade settlements .

Having looked around for suitable data virtualisation platforms currently on the market , how did you settle for the Denodo Platform ?

The JSE was looking for an agile , flexible , and pragmatic solution to integrate its disparate IT landscape without creating further complexities and friction for future transformations . The modern data virtualisation technology instantly caught our attention as it would help us avoid creating physical links and duplication of data , the lack of which earlier had contributed to the inconsistency in the data across systems . For JSE , Denodo was a practical choice in our decision-making process ; they are a market-leading vendor in the data virtualisation space with an expansive set of data adapters and a wide range of existing customers . The solution addressed a key capability gap in our solution architecture . Denodo has enabled us to accelerate and

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