Case Study

Atlantic Brokers are an introducing broker of Physical and Financial Coal Products in both the Atlantic and Pacific Basins. Atlantic Brokers are a wholesale broker for all of the Financial Coal products traded on CME Clearport & ICE .

Their client base consists of European Utilities, Investment Banks, Major Coal Producers, Energy Hedge Funds and Commodity Trading Houses.

On inception the partners needed sound IT guidance from IT consultants who understood their trading market and the challenges and services required to keep the fast paced and critical trading and voice applications running reliably and quickly.

The original mandate was for expandable server based trading platform that could support expansion as the business grew. The platform would need to be able to support a bespoke in house broker back office system. This is built on an SQL and IIS backbone.

Ontraq were chosen as Atlantic’s technology and support partner after initial technical conversations and meetings. Atlantic’s decision to choose Ontraq was based on our experience and background of Trading floor setups, applications and dynamics and the ability to offer support in real time high pressure environments.

The solution provided entailed Network Infrastructure cabling, Comms room server cabinet setup and management of Leased lines and a complex VLAN setup for the Trader Voice Turrets supplied by IPC.

Server backend was designed; sourced and deployed using mid line HP Servers and HP Pro workstations with trading level quad screen graphics cards. All trading applications were installed and tested prior to deployment.

From day one the technical environment was running seamlessly and over the last 5 years has kept pace with growth of the company which saw staff numbers grow 300%.

The solution provided has allowed Atlantic Brokers to surpass initial expectations and to establish themselves as a key player in the fast moving and competitive Energy Broking sector.