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Changing the game
Celoxica focuses on accelerated computing for financial services. Lee Staines, CEO explains the strategy.
Q. What are the key business changes?
A. Since I joined Celoxica in July 2007 we have been busy executing our strategy to concentrate on accelerated computing and have re-organised the business to maximise our efficiency around this goal. Additional finance to support our restructuring was raised; we sold part of the non-core Celoxica business and have refined our business strategy to concentrate on key applications in the financial services industry. We believe, and the signs from the market are very encouraging, that our accelerated computing technologies can help financial institutions to be first to react and gain real competitive advantage.
Q. What are the effects of the restructuring?
A. We have been addressing three key issues. Firstly we wanted to improve the business strategy and focus; secondly we needed to articulate our value proposition more precisely and thirdly, create a business model which is both service-driven and open to explore new partnership opportunities.
Q. How is the business focus changing?
A. We have identified financial services as our target market and we are transforming Celoxica from a technology company to a solutions provider. There is a rising demand for accelerated solutions within investment banks, market data providers and exchanges and a good match with the low-latency and high bandwidth benefits that Celoxica provides.
Q. Where does your value proposition win?
A. Our technology is without question at the forefront of accelerated computing techniques but we haven’t always been successful in explaining our value proposition to our potential customers. Already within capital markets we have identified several scenarios where our ‘Accelerator’ solutions deliver such low latency that the return on investment can potentially be measured in minutes. The first such environment is that of market data capture, where our combination of hardware, firmware, APIs and services offer a compelling new solution to trading groups. They can capture market data faster than any alternative available today, which means that our clients can react to changing market conditions more quickly and trade faster than their competitors. Early benchmark testing has shown that our solution can deliver under 2 microsecond latency and extremely high bandwidth (over 10 million messages per second).
Q. How has the business model changed?
A. The new solution set will be provided as a complete service offering. For example, we will take care of the feed management from the Exchanges as well as providing customers with a broad range of upgrade, implementation, project support and customised development services.
Q. What are the signs that the new strategy is working?
The initial feedback from the market is very encouraging with one US-based trading group describing our solution and bench mark results as ‘game changing’. And I think that sums up the new Celoxica pretty well.
