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United World Securities uses ftServer system to help customers capitalize on rapid growth in the Hong Kong and China stock markets

The sluggish stock market in Japan has triggered a rush of Japanese investors looking for opportunities in the Hong Kong and China markets. Following a wave of the biggest-ever IPOs worldwide, Greater China seems to be the one market in Asia starting the new year with a mighty roar.

United World Securities (UWS) is a leading Japanese securities firm headquartered in Okinawa with offices in Tokyo and Hong Kong. UWS acts as a gateway for its customers in Japan and is positioned to help them capitalize on the rapidly increasing number of opportunities in resurgent emerging Asia Pacific markets such as China and Hong Kong.

UWS has offices in Japan and Hong Kong that handle several thousand equities and futures transactions on a daily basis. Most of these transactions are effected in Hong Kong. For a middle-market operation such as UWS, where it is often not feasible to employ a dedicated IT manager, it is vital to protect mission-critical IT operations and to resolve the problem of computer downtime by implementing a fault-tolerant system that provides simplicity and continuous availability, thus avoiding the embarrassment and cost of system failures.

In the search for a fail-safe solution, UWS evaluated various systems. UWS selected the ftServer system from Stratus Technologies because of Stratus' reputation and proven success in the highly competitive Japanese and Greater China markets. Additionally, Stratus offered direct support and service out of its Hong Kong facility as part of the package.

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Real-time online brokerage services

UWS offers online securities and futures brokering services through its real-time Internet platform, supported by the Stratus^® ftServer^® 3300 system. The ftServer system fields buy/sell requests from customers, routes them to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange's AMS/3 system, and then sends a reply or confirmation from the Exchange and patches it through to the customer in Japan or elsewhere.

The ftServer system also supports real-time quotations so that customers can access and check up-to-date stock and futures prices at any time. Customers may also access and use the UWS system to maintain their own customer profiles with a real-time record of their positions and margin funds available, as well as access the latest investor information on listed companies in Hong Kong and China.

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Rapid deployment out of the box

After installation of the solution, UWS reported that the ftServer system was so easy to configure and deploy that the whole process took less than a month, compared with two months for a conventional cluster-based approach in a comparable environment. This was thanks to the support provided by Stratus Technologies. As Mr Adachi, IT Manager, United World Securities said, "Stratus' special skills, expertise and extraordinary efforts gave us a tremendous amount of help — support that other vendors could not match.

"Downtime avoidance is the single most important reason why UWS chose the Stratus ftServer system. Previously, using a conventional Windows^®  2000-based clustered server system, we might expect to encounter one failure a month. But since deploying the ftServer system, we've experienced no downtime at all. That means that the transaction volume, the lifeblood of the company, is effectively preserved," added Mr Adachi.

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Unplanned downtime is not an option

Mr Adachi elaborated on the reasons why UWS deployed and implemented ftServer technology instead of clustering technology. "Stratus ftServer systems are market-proven as a 'zero downtime*' technology, meeting the mission-critical needs of financial services and securities firms. In the past, downtime associated with clustering-based systems meant we needed to re-boot the server every month, and this kind of failure translated immediately into lost revenue. With the ftServer system, however, no human intervention is needed to rectify a system failure, and it is capable of resuming service in seconds. In other words, fault-tolerant technology is the only choice for our high-pressure, high-transaction-volume, 24x7 operating environment."

As its regional business rapidly expands, UWS is now considering upgrading its systems to the Stratus ftServer 5600 and ftServer 6600 systems, which provide even more powerful features and processing capabilities.

*Zero downtime as at 14 January 2004

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