Calastone selects ‘Data Centre Operator of the Year’ for managed hosting

Calastone announces successful hosting transition to iomart Hosting’s London site with retention of previous site for DR requirements

London, 24 June 2009 - Calastone Limited, the independent cross-border transaction network for the mutual funds industry, announced today that its data centre outsource provider, iomart Hosting, has been named Data Centre Operator of the Year 2009 in the annual ‘Storrie’ awards, organised by Storage Magazine.

In December 2008, Calastone selected iomart Hosting to provide its primary hosting facilities and successfully transitioned to iomart’s central London location in April this year. As part of this strategic development, Calastone has retained its previous data centre as a fully functioning disaster recovery (DR) site and will continue to invest further to ensure its capability to handle primary data centre volumes. This will mean that, should DR ever need to be invoked, the impact to customers will be minimised. Calastone’s new primary data centre is located in London, with the DR data centre located in Scotland. This distance between Calastone’s data centres is part of the design to ensure, should operations across London be subject to a major incident, that the potential impact to Calastone’s DR site, and therefore customer service, are minimised.

Ian Taylor, Chief Operating Officer of Calastone, said, “We congratulate iomart Hosting on their recent award. We were confident in our appointment of them as data centre outsource provider and this only affirms that we made the right decision.

Kevin Lee, Managing Director of Calastone added, “Our new data centre delivers on Calastone’s strategic promise to customers and the market as a whole, to support its rapid growth in the connected customer community. By connecting to Calastone’s global transaction network, participants will benefit from fully electronic STP throughout the transaction lifecycle, with their preferred messaging protocol.”

The winner of the ‘Storries’ award is selected by readers of Storage Magazine who vote for, and reward, companies and services they believe have made significant contributions to the IT industry during the past year. It is understood that more than 20,000 votes were cast for this year’s awards.

Angus MacSween, CEO, iomart Hosting stated: “We are naturally very pleased to have won such a prestigious award, and equally, we were delighted to have been appointed by Calastone. We worked closely with the team throughout the data centre transition and look forward to a fruitful partnership.”

Calastone was established in March 2007 by three joint-founders, Kevin Lee (Managing Director), Ian Taylor (Chief Operating Officer) and Campbell Brierley (Chief Technology Officer). From industry experience they recognised that, unlike the institutional market, communications in the mutual fund industry between the fund providers, distributors and their transfer agents was nothing short of archaic. Messaging is still conducted by phone, fax, email, and excel spreadsheet; and the industry has been lacking a transaction network capable of handling and interpreting instructions.

Calastone presents, for the first time, the opportunity for the whole mutual fund market to become fully electronic. The magic of the Calastone’s transaction network is that participants are able to send/receive instructions in any way they prefer, whatever their messaging protocol. Also, for the first time, participants can track their trades and manage exceptions on a real-time electronic basis throughout the transaction lifecycle. Real-time tracking through Calastone’s execution management system helps firms reduce not only their costs but also operating risks.

Calastone
KING STREET
LONDON
EC2V 8BB
United Kingdom

Julia Streets/Holly Finn
Streets Consulting Ltd
Julia.streets@streetsconsulting.com / holly.finn@streetsconsulting.com
Tel: + 44 207 959 2235

This release was published on openPR.