Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer & Chief Technology Officer, Nasdaq Inc
Brad Peterson, NASDAQ & Scott Mullins, AWS | AWS re:Invent 2022
Brad Peterson, EVP & CIO/CTO, at NASDAQ AND Scott Mullins, GM, AWS Worldwide Financial Services, at AWS joins theCUBE for AWS re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas, NV.
About Bradley Peterson
In a December 2022 interview at AWS re:Invent, Bradley Peterson stated that Nasdaq had moved one of its U.S. options markets, the MRX Exchange (called Mercury), to production on AWS as of November 7. He described options markets as the most challenging due to high volume and performance demands, and said the new platform achieved better performance than Nasdaq's previous platform. Peterson noted that Nasdaq used AWS Outposts to extend the AWS region into its Carteret, New Jersey data center, which he said simplified conversations with regulators. Peterson also said Nasdaq announced plans to offer a digital assets custody solution through the Amazon marketplace. He characterized the collaboration with AWS as "modernizing the capital market's infrastructure together."
Transcript (49 segments)
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Lisa Martin0:10
You've been watching theCUBE all week, we know that. This is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 22, from the Venetian Expo Center where there are tens of thousands of people, and this event covers the entire strip. There are over 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been a fantastic show. It is clear everyone's back. We're hearing phenomenal stories from AWS and its ecosystem. We got a great customer story coming up next, featured on the main stage.
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Dave Vellante0:40
Yeah, I mean, post pandemic, you start to think about how things are changing. And one of the things that we heard from Adam Selipsky was, we're going beyond digital transformation into business transformation. That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I have a sense of what it means. And I think this next interview really talks to business transformation beyond digital transformation.
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Lisa Martin1:12
Welcome guys. Great to have you.
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Bradley Peterson1:13
Hey guys. Thanks for having us.
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Dave Vellante1:15
Yeah.
Brad, talk a little bit, there was an announcement with NASDAQ and AWS last year, a year ago, about how they're partnering to transform capital markets. It was a highlight of last year. Remind us what you talked about and what's gone on since then.
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Bradley Peterson1:31
Yeah, so, we are very excited. I work with Adena Friedman, she's my boss, CEO of NASDAQ, and she was on stage with Adam for his first Keynote as CEO of AWS. And we made the commitment that we were going to move our markets to the Cloud. And we've been a long time customer of AWS and everyone said, you know the last piece, and we said we were going to move one of our options markets. In the US, we have six of them. And options markets are the most challenging, they're the most high volume and high performance. So we said, let's start with something really challenging and prove we can do it together with AWS. So we committed to that.
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Dave Vellante2:32
And? Results so far?
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Bradley Peterson2:34
So, I can sit here and say that November 7th, so we are live, we're in production and the MRX Exchange is called Mercury, so we shorten it for MRX, we like acronyms in technology. And so, we started with a phased launch of symbols, so you kind of allow yourself to make sure you have all the functionality working then you add some volume on it, if you want to talk about why we did that together.
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Dave Vellante3:16
Yeah.
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Bradley Peterson3:17
And what we've done together over many years.
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Dave Vellante3:20
Right. You know, Brian, I think it's a natural extension of our relationship, right? You look at the 12 year relationship that AWS and NASDAQ have had together, it's just the next step, in the way that we're going to help the industry transform itself. And so not just NASDAQ's business transformation for itself, but really a blueprint and a template for the entire capital markets industry. And so many times people will ask me, who's using Cloud well? Who's doing well in the Cloud? And NASDAQ is an easy example to point to, of somebody who's truly taking advantage of these capabilities because the Cloud isn't a place, it's a set of capabilities. And so, this is a shining example of how to use these capabilities that technology companies are building on top of the Cloud. We said, the big trend that we see in the 2020s is that consumers of IT, historically, your customers are going to start taking their stacks, their software, their data, their services and sassifying, putting it on the Cloud and delivering new services to customers. So when we saw Adena on stage last year, we called it by the way, we called it Super Cloud.
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Bradley Peterson4:33
Yeah.
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Dave Vellante4:33
Some people liked the term but I love it. And so yeah, Super Cloud. So when we saw Adena on stage, we said that's a great example. We've seen Capital One doing some similar things, we've had some conversations with US West, it's happening, right? So talk about how you actually do that. I mean, because you've got a big on-premises stay, are you connecting to that? Is it all in the Cloud? Paint a picture of what the architecture looks like?
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Bradley Peterson5:11
And in Europe and in Canada. So we have our own markets that we're looking at modernizing. So we look at this, as a modernization of the capital market infrastructure, but we happen to be the leading technology provider for other markets around the world. So you either build your own or you source from us. And we're by far the leading provider. So a lot of our customers said, how about if you go first? It's kind of like Mikey, you know, give it to Mikey, let him try it.
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Dave Vellante5:41
See if Mikey likes it.
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Bradley Peterson5:42
Yeah.
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Dave Vellante5:43
Penguin off the iceberg thing.
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Bradley Peterson5:44
Yeah. And so what we did is we said, to make this easy for our customers, so you want to ask your customers, you want to figure out how you can do it so that you don't disrupt their business. So we took the Edge Compute and we extended the region into our Carteret data center in Northern New Jersey, which gave us all the services that we know and love from Amazon. So our technical operations team has the same tools and services but then, we're able to connect because in the markets what we're doing is we need to connect fairly. So we need to ensure that you still have that fairness element. So by bringing it into our building and extending the Edge Compute platform, the AWS Outpost into Carteret, that allowed us to also talk very succinctly with our regulators. It's a familiar territory, it's all buttoned up. And that simplified the conversation with the regulators.
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Dave Vellante7:12
Figured out how to bolt that in, less cloudy. So why did you choose Outposts? I am curious.
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Bradley Peterson7:19
Well, Outposts looked like when it was announced, that it was really about extending territory, so we had our customers in mind, our global customers, and they don't always have an AWS region in country. So a lot of you think about a regulator, they're going to say, well where is this region located? So finally we saw this ability to grow the Cloud geographically. And of course we're in Sweden, so we work with the AWS region in Stockholm, but not every country has a region yet.
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Dave Vellante7:55
And we're working as fast as we can.
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Bradley Peterson7:56
Yes, you are.
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Dave Vellante7:57
Building in every single location around the planet. So maybe talk a little bit about what you guys had in mind and it's a multi-industry trend that the Edge Compute has four or five industries that you can say, this really makes a lot of sense to extend the Cloud.
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Brian8:26
And David, you said it earlier, there's a trend of ecosystems that are coming onto the Cloud. This is our opportunity to bring the Cloud to an ecosystem, to an existing ecosystem. And if you think about NASDAQ's data center in Carteret, there's an ecosystem of NASDAQ's clients there that are there to be with NASDAQ. And so, it was actually much easier for us as we worked together over a really a four year period, thinking about this and how to make this technological transition, to actually bring the capabilities to that ecosystem, rather than trying to bring the ecosystem to AWS. And so to Brad's point about servicing other markets in different countries around the world, it actually gives us that ability to do that very quickly, very nimbly and very succinctly and successfully.
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Dave Vellante9:22
Did you guys write a working backwards document for this initiative?
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Bradley Peterson9:25
We did.
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Brian9:26
Yeah, we actually did. So to be, this is one of the fully exercised. We have a couple of... So by the way, Scott used to work at NASDAQ and we have a number of people who have gone from NASDAQ data to AWS, and from AWS to NASDAQ. So we have adopted, that's one of the things that we think is an effective way to really clarify what you're trying to accomplish with a project. So I know you're a little bit kidding on that, but we did.
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Dave Vellante9:55
No, I was close. Because I want to go to the like, where are we in the milestone?
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Brian10:10
We're very excited that we've stood up MRX in production. Having worked at NASDAQ myself, when you make a change and when you stand up a market that's always a moment where you're working with your community, with your clients and you've got a market-wide call that you're working and you're wanting to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And so, when that call went smoothly and that transition went smoothly I know you were very happy, and in AWS, we were also very happy as well that we hit that milestone within the timeframe that Adena set. And that was very important I know to you.
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Bradley Peterson10:42
Yeah.
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Brian10:43
And for us as well.
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Bradley Peterson10:43
Yeah. And our commitment, so the time base of this one was by the end of 2022. So November 7th, checked. We got that one done.
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Dave Vellante10:52
That's awesome.
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Bradley Peterson10:53
The other one is we said, we wanted the performance to one market in the US then we rolled it earlier this year and that was last year. And we rolled it to our nordic derivatives market. And we saw really good customer feedback. So we had confidence in our software was going to run. Now we had to marry that up with the Outpost platform and we said we really want to achieve as good or better performance and we achieved better performance, so that's noticeable by our customers. And that one was the biggest question. I think our customers understand when we set a date, we test them with them. We have our national test facility that they can test in. But really the big question was how is it going to perform? And that was, I think one of the biggest proof points. We're never done.
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Dave Vellante12:12
Right.
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Bradley Peterson12:13
But we have a final result that says it is better.
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Dave Vellante12:16
Well, congratulations.
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Bradley Peterson12:17
Thank you.
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Dave Vellante12:17
It sounds like you guys have done a tremendous job. What can we expect in 2023? From NASDAQ and AWS? Any little nuggets you can share?
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Bradley Peterson12:24
Well, we just came from the partner Keynote with Adam and Ruba and we had another colleague on stage, so Nick Ciubotariu, so he is actually someone who brought digital assets and cryptocurrencies onto the Venmo, PayPal platform. He joined NASDAQ about a year ago and we announced that in our marketplace, the Amazon marketplace, we are going to offer digital custody, but we've learned so much from Amazon over the years. Two pieces of teams, we talked about working backwards, customer obsession, but this is a story of NASDAQ pointing its internal capabilities externally. We're already on that journey and then, bringing that to the Cloud. Very powerful story.
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Dave Vellante13:25
I wonder what's next in this, because we learn a lot and we, it's like the NFL, we copy it. I think about product market fit. You think about scientific go to market and seeing that applied to the financial services industry and obviously other industries, it's really exciting to see. So congratulations.
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Bradley Peterson13:46
No, thank you. And look, I think it's an example of Invent and Simplify, that's another Amazon principle. And this is, I think a great example of inventing on behalf of an industry and then continually working to simplify the way that the industry works with all of us.
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Dave Vellante14:11
If you had a banner that said what NASDAQ and AWS are doing together, what would it say?
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Bradley Peterson14:15
Oh, and I think I'm going to put that up on Monday. So we're going to close the market together and it's going to say, 'Modernizing the capital market's infrastructure together.'
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Dave Vellante14:25
Very cool.
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Lisa Martin14:26
Excellent. Drop the mic. Guys, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate you joining us on the show, sharing your insights and what NASDAQ and AWS are doing. We're going to have to keep watching this. You're going to have to come back next year.
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Bradley Peterson14:38
All right.
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Lisa Martin14:39
For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.