By Wall Street and Technology
22 July 2008
URL: http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209400735
Steve Rubinow
Chief Technology Officer
NYSE Euronext 11 Wall St. New York, NY 10005
SIZE OF FIRM:
Market capitalization of $30.5 trillion.
PREVIOUS POSITIONS:
CTO, Archipelago Holdings; CIO, NextCard; CIO, AdKnowledge; VP of corporate management information systems, Fidelity Investments.
EDUCATION:
B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in chemistry and M.B.A., University of Illinois; M.S. in computer science, DePaul University.
HOBBIES:
Weather permitting, I am a cyclist. Also, I collect Native American sculptures. A lot of indigenous peoples have certain animals that they believe draw certain powers. When I got into this more than 20 years ago, I became attracted to bears. The bear symbolizes power or well-being to me.
VITALS:
IT Budget:
NA
Key Technology Management:
NA
Size of Technology Team:
In the hundreds.
Percent of IT Projects Outsourced:
It is a relatively small number. That doesn’t mean we won’t be doing more in the future.
Key Technology Partners:
HP, IBM, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, EMC and Hitachi.
TOP 3 CURRENT PROJECTS
Completing the Euronext Integration
We are still working on the integration; it has been a multiyear project. It’s about integrating systems while allowing all the component companies to run their businesses every day. At the same time, we are trying to consolidate so we don’t have multiple versions of something when we only need one. This integration project has a software piece, a hardware piece, a network piece and a data center piece.
Coping With New Acquisitions
We acquired the American Stock Exchange (AmEx) this year, and that is an integration project for us this year. We also acquired Wombat Financial Software, a pure technology company. Their entree was an efficient way of delivering market data. Wombat has a good installed base, and we’re going to build on that. Tech offerings are as important to us as the traditional plays.
Competing With Nasdaq And Others
We’re basically in an arms race in terms of all the major exchanges. We’re all trying to be the fastest, least expensive and most reliable in the country and, soon, the world. We have to write really smart software, and we have to take advantage of new technology advances that our vendors offer us. Networks, servers, OSs — we have to take advantage of these things very quickly. You have to be nimble in order to take advantage of an opportunity today, even if that advantage won’t be sustainable over time.
2009 INITIATIVES
Organizational Efficiency
A lot of this is motherhood and apple pie. We became a for-profit public company two years ago, and there are some changes that go along with that. We still need to be more efficient and more nimble and more flexible. We have to improve productivity. The easiest way to do this is to cut costs. Another way is to get more work out of the company in the same unit of time. We try to figure out how to work smarter all the time.
GLOBALIZATION
Right now, our market is a bit fragmented — every country has its own exchange, and they might all be different. What we’re trying to do from a business standpoint and a world economy standpoint is to consolidate and integrate. We want to trade these instruments without regard to type or country of origin in a transparent fashion. This will make markets more fluid and robust.
Steven C. Rubinow 