Stock market to upgrade IT platform

The Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) will be upgrading and enhancing its information technology (IT) platform to improve its operational efficiency and reduce the costs of trading to its broker members.

PSE chief technology officer Edilberto Ocampo said some P4.5 million will be needed to put up and start a data warehouse service, upgrade the telecommunication lines and install a virtual private network (VPN), a secure and accessible connection to the Exchange by the borkers, especially those with provincial or offsite offices.

Ocampo said the data warehouse would house all the critical PSE-related information under one system, making it cheaper and more efficient. "By putting in a data warehouse, we hope to make a quick research by analyzing which data would be put in the PSE website and which ones to be archived and accessed through subscription," he added.

A data warehouse is a central repository for all data in an enterprise or organization which is bundled together on a mainframe server, as data from various online transaction processing applications and other sources are selectively extracted and organized on the data warehouse database.

Ocampo said the VPN, on the other hand, would not only provide a more systematic and efficient trading service to the brokers but also significantly bring down their operating costs on leased lines or dial-up telephone connections.

Based on estimates, the VPN would cost the brokers P5,000 for leased line modem charges and P2,200 per port on dial-up connection, a big savings from the current monthly charges of P13,000 and P5,000, respectively.

In addition, the PSE will also be upgrading its private branch exchange (PBX) to facilitate its objective of transferring facsimile transmissions to e-mails. The PBX is a telephone system that switches calls between users on local lines while allowing all users to share a certain number of external phone lines.

The main purpose of the PBX is to save the cost of requiring a line for each user to the telephone company’s central office. The Exchange has recently begun converting some of its direct lines to trunked lines.