“Time is of the essence—it’s broadcast on steroids—it’s amazing how fast money can be gained and lost.”?
– Michael Brown, regional sales manager, east coast, RTS/Telex
Greenwich, Connecticut
World leaders in intercom solutions, RTS and Telex, recently provided solutions for the critical communications demands of Level Global,
LLC
, east coast based hedge fund brokerage house. Given the rapid speed at which financial markets change on a daily basis, Level Global turned to RTS and Telex for an extensive communications system that would facilitate immediate voice command and monitoring at four separate office locations in different cities.
The speed of communication facilitated by
-based equipment allows the rapid decision-making that is crucial in hedge fund trading. The reality of the industry is that hundreds of thousands of dollars can be gained or lost in a matter of minutes. As a technology that allows instantaneous voice communication over standard Ethernet cabling, RTS offers a product that brings numerous lines of communication together into one box via
that enable crystal clear communication; users are intelligible and can convey critical opinions that affect key financial business decisions. When people say that ‘time is money’, it’s very much the case.
As a solution to their demands, the design at Level Global featured (47) RTS
and an
full frame loaded with 8
. Level Global’s Madison Avenue office is installed with 14
for means of order entry.
Michael Brown, regional sales manager, east coast, for RTS and Telex comments:
“We were able to provide an extensive system at the brokerage house Level Global,
LLC
. Although based in Greenwich, Connecticut, they also have offices in Stanford, Hampton, where the owner keeps his boat, and at their training facility on Madison Avenue in New York City. We were introduced to Level Global and discovered that they had a very defined communications need.”?
Brown continues: “In this case, the analyst, the traders, and the brokers are located in Greenwich on the fourth floor of a very large building. The office lacks traditional cubicles; it’s desk after desk after desk situated in an open room. The analysts are located at the desks and on the outside of the desks—in what they call the bullpen—you have the actual brokers and traders. They are all tied together via an
that is housed in their equipment room and all of the individual
—25 in this case—sit on desks, so that each analyst has one sitting right in front of him. The owner and all the principals are located in window offices around the perimeter. The owner has three offices: his office on Madison Avenue in
NY
, an office in Greenwich, the office on his boat, and an office in his home. So that no matter where he goes, he can monitor, if he wishes, a specific event that’s coming up. Let me give you an example to show you just how well our system works for this kind of application.”?
Brown explains: “All of these locations are connected via our
. The benefits of going
are—at least one—is that the installation does not disrupt business as usual. Level Global has a very extensive, complicated
IT
network. And for us or an integrator to go in and string additional cable to all 26 locations would be time-extensive, expensive and very inconvenient for them. They don’t want any more cable strung and people crawling underneath desks, possible unplugging things, so we simply take their
IT
backbone and piggyback our communications solution to it. So it’s a very simple and seamless integration. So, when we did the proof-of-concept, we brought in an
and literally stuck a couple of
on their network and life was grand. In fact, it exploded from there. We started with 25
and ended up with 47 as we speak. Level Global has expanded since the initial install from occupying the fourth floor to taking residence of the third floor and now they’re building out part of the second floor. So they’re growing. You can contribute a large part of that to the seamless communications that the
and
enabled
have been able to provide.”?
Although intercom has long been a necessary cog in the wheel of television broadcasting, industrial settings requiring critical communications (i.e. nuclear facilities, factories, military applications, theaters and performance centers, only recently has the world of high-impact investment caught on to the use of the technology in the critical day-to-day communications infrastructure. With this entrance into the world of intercom technologies, there have been numerous creative concepts brought to the manufacturer. It’s the case that industries vary in what their communications needs are. Hence, from the brokerage house industry have come several ideas to utilize existing feature sets in ways they have not previously been deployed. Brown explains:
“Another solution that they were able to address—definitely more creative on their side for conceptualizing it—was in their training center where they have a number of large plasma screens that are split into quads that feature CNBC, CNNSC and MSNBC. Prior to our installation, all they had were with crawls along the bottom of the screens sans audio. They came up with the idea to take the audio and pass it along to the individual
. Although we’ve never used the capabilities of the
and the
in this way, we told them it wouldn’t pose a problem. We took the audio that came from their cable television system and redirected it to the
, enabling anyone in any of the 47
to listen to any one of four financial networks being fed into the
while still maintaining a conversation and monitoring key financial information via the networks. We run into a lot of creative thinking like this in the new markets. This is a great example of what the frame can do with not only monitoring audio but VPL statements for triggering things; we’ve got alarms built in where if a certain event occurs that’s tied to their database it can trigger another event in the
if that event occurs. They haven’t set up the system to do that yet, but it can already do it.
For example, if you know that a certain event is occurring, let’s say that at 9:00 a.m. next Wednesday the Federal Treasury is going to give an announcement on interest rates. You can set an event—a VPL statement—based on this date and this time—for all
to open up this key and provide audio. So if you and I are talking and we aren’t thinking about this specific event, the
is still going to take that audio feed and automatically send it to your
. That’s another unique feature that is being used by the brokerage house community. Really, it’s endless.”?
For more information, visit the RTS Intercom website:
