WEYTEC’s commission was to remote all of the workstations away from the desks and into two centralised but geographically completely separate system rooms, thus creating energy-efficient working environments with minimal emissions. The full free-seating solution meant that it must be possible to distribute and connect any and all data sources to any indivi­dual workplace. Furthermore, the new solution had to guarantee maximum flexibility as well as significantly reduce the time, effort and annual costs associated with moves, adds and changes. All the systems, including access lines between the trading center and the backup trading floor had to be redundant to reduce the risk of failure to an absolute minimum. The new IT architecture also needed to eliminate the complex update processes for the backup systems. Only short tests whereby the traders from the backup trading floor periodically log on to their systems should be sufficient to check for permanent service availability. All these requirements have been fully met. 

The IT infrastructure of trading floors is particularly complex because diverse systems from multiple vendors converge there. According to LGT, “the biggest challenge in the entire renovation project was the refurbishment of the trading floor.” Acting upon the advice of WEYTEC, a fully-equipped transitional trading area was built based upon the technology of the new system, a strategy that has proven its efficiency in the past. Thus, dealers were assured of uninterrupted operations during the entire renovation work, and they familiarized themselves with the new system at the same time. After the restructuring, the traders successively returned to a fully operational new trading floor. According to Mr. Zumerle, this approach was “well planned, precise and executed without problems.”
 

The 54 new high-performance desks in the trading center in Bendern, as well as the 15 new desks in the backup trading floor, which is located sufficiently far enough away at the other site, now benefit from the fully integrated WEYTEC distributionPLATFORM solution. This architecture allows for all 120 computers, which were previously located under the individual trader desks, to be relocated into centralised data centers. The WEYTEC distributionPLATFORM enables the secure and latency-free switching of all the remoted PCs to the respective desks. It standardises the functionality of KVM switches and extenders, and thanks to the IP-based transmission concept, overcomes distance-related restrictions between the computers and the trader desks - in real-time. LGT’s Trading and Treasury Departments now benefit from a completely new kind of free-seating concept. 

Over 3600 buy and sell orders are now processed daily from 54 trader desks, each outfitted with six energy-efficient monitors. The key element on the desktop is the newest version of the WEYTEC MK06 Multifunctional Keyboard, used to efficiently and centrally control all the applications required for top performance at a trader desk – including Bloomberg and Reuters Dealing keypads directly implemented on the keyboard.

For financial institutions, systems are required that guarantee the highest levels of continuity and reliability, and the WEYTEC distributionPLATFORM is geared to deliver exactly that. The redundant system architecture (see figure below) including redundant transmission lines connecting the backup trading floor, reduce the risk of downtime to an absolute minimum. The trick here is that 15 selected dealers in the main trading center are permanently accessing computers located at the backup site. The traders are not affected by this at all – they do not even notice a difference in the quality of service. But in the case of an emergency, they can relocate to the backup location in under 30 minutes time, continue to work there as normal and thus sustain the bank’s trading operations.

System security and reliability continue to be highly important after the completion of the installation. WEYTEC professional services include comprehensive support with reaction times of less than four hours and preventative maintenance. According to Mr. Zumerle, “the easy availability as well as our extremely high level of satisfaction in the past was also an important factor in our ultimate decision to select WEYTEC as our provider.”
 

The overall solution, which was customized to meet LGT’s requirements for a redundancy concept, provides the key benefit for LGT and was a clear competitive advantage for WEYTEC compared with other provider proposals. Furthermore, the flexibility of free-seating as well as cost consolidation and an investment guarantee from WEYTEC are important advantages of this solution. 
Due to uniform workplace layouts (including height adjustable desks) and the users’ intuitive control of sources and systems, trading processes can be carried out in a more efficient manner. And after the PCs were remoted to a central server room, the office atmospheric environment was dramatically improved (reduction of noise, dust, heat and electromagnetic emissions). And last but not least, air conditioning at the desk was also eliminated, leading to additional simplifications of the office design as well as significant cost and energy savings.