October 04, 2006 (Computerworld) -- Until a few months ago, the clearing and billing system for NYSE Group Inc.’s stock options exchange consisted of about 800 discrete Cobol programs running on an IBM mainframe. Today, the entire application set has migrated onto a pair of clustered, quadprocessor Windows servers. The recompiled programs remain in Cobol today, but they won't stay there for long.

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Hirsch says the NYSE's options business went from spending $2.5 million annually for a hosted mainframe to $200,000 for an in-house distributed system that runs 10 to 20 times faster for real-time applications.

The Archipelago technologists are skilled at high performance, mission-critical Windows operations and have said they expect to replace old systems at the NYSE with more modern technology. See Windows in Financial Services on the Pacfic Exchange, which was acquired by Archipelago

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